Why is my website different from realtor.ca?

Because your website and realtor.ca drink from different pipes. Realtor.ca is fed by CREA’s DDF syndication — brokerages opting listings into the national portal — while your website runs on a board data feed licensed to you, with its own scope and its own sync clock. Neither one is “the MLS”: the board’s system is the record, and both sites are downstream copies of different slices of it, refreshed on different schedules. Once you see the two pipelines, every mismatch a client shows you has a boring explanation.

Two pipelines from one record

The board’s internal system is where listings actually live. From there, data flows outward along two separate channels. Channel one: CREA’s DDF carries listings that brokerages chose to syndicate up to realtor.ca and other DDF consumers — national in reach, participation-dependent in content, active listings only. Channel two: your board feed carries the slice your IDX or VOW agreement licenses to your registered site — deeper, fresher where the platform syncs aggressively, but scoped to your board and your agreement. Same origin, different filters, different clocks. Expecting the two displays to match at every moment misunderstands what both of them are.

Why a listing shows on one and not the other

Coverage differences come from the filters. A listing can appear on realtor.ca but not your site because it belongs to a neighbouring board you hold no feed for, or sits in a lane your feed excludes. The reverse happens just as legitimately: a listing can be on your site but absent from realtor.ca because its brokerage didn’t syndicate it — DDF participation is opt-in, and not everyone opts in. Add seller display restrictions, which compliant sites must honour, and “why is this listing missing?” almost always resolves to scope, not malfunction. The systematic checklist for the your-site side is in why listings go missing from an IDX website.

Why prices and details differ

Timing differences come from the clocks. Every downstream copy re-syncs on its own cadence, so a price change or a status flip propagates to each display when that display next syncs — and in the gap, the two disagree. Whichever site synced most recently is telling the truth. This is where sites genuinely differ in quality: board rules set a compliance floor measured in hours, while a well-built pipeline syncs in minutes, and the spread between those is exactly the window in which a client sees a sold house still marked active. The standards worth demanding are laid out in how fresh MLS data must be and listing data freshness. Fields differ too: the two channels don’t carry identical field sets, so a detail present on one display can be absent, not wrong, on the other.

Which one should a serious buyer trust?

For freshness on a given listing: whichever copy synced latest — unknowable from the outside, which is why the honest answer is “let me check the board record.” For depth in your market: a full board feed beats a syndicated subset, and a VOW-equipped site adds the sold-price and history layer the DDF pipeline doesn’t carry. For national browsing outside your board’s territory, realtor.ca’s breadth wins. These aren’t competing claims — they’re different tools, and the agent who can say which tool answers which question sounds like the expert in the room.

Turning the question into trust

Clients will keep asking this — it may be the single most common data question agents field — so keep the answer ready: “Realtor.ca is the national portal fed by brokerage syndication; my site runs directly on our board’s feed, synced every few minutes, with the gated sold layer on top. When they disagree, one of them synced more recently — here’s the current record.” Ninety seconds, no jargon, and the mismatch your client found becomes the moment they understand why your website exists.