CREA DDF

The DDF — Data Distribution Facility — is CREA’s national listing distribution service. It takes listings that members have shared to REALTOR.ca and syndicates them, with the listing brokerage’s opt-in, to other members’ websites and approved third-party destinations. It is the closest thing Canada has to a country-wide listing feed, and understanding what it is not matters as much as what it is.

How the DDF works

Participation is voluntary at every link in the chain. A brokerage chooses whether its listings join the national sharing pool; a member chooses whether their website consumes it; technology providers register with CREA to move the data, today over the RESO Web API standard. What flows through is essentially the REALTOR.ca public record: the fields consumers see on the portal, not the fuller record a board’s own MLS system holds. Sold prices, history, and members-only fields never enter the DDF at all.

DDF versus a board feed for your website

The trade is breadth against depth. The DDF can put listings from many markets on one site, which suits national franchise pages and directory-style products. A board feed delivers one board’s inventory complete: every active listing, richer fields, board-cadence updates, and the VOW lane for sold data — none of which the national pool offers. For an agent whose business lives inside one or two board footprints, the board-direct route wins on completeness and freshness, which is why BrokerFold builds on direct board feeds; the comparison shopping guide is IDX websites in Canada, and the plumbing is explained in what is an IDX website.

Common confusions

The DDF is not “the MLS feed” — no such single feed exists, and the DDF’s opt-in design guarantees it is always a subset of the market. It is also not free listing advertising with no strings: DDF display comes with its own technical rules and required attributions, just as board programs do. Finally, the DDF is one channel inside the broader machinery of listing syndication — how a listing entered once reaches many screens — and it moves data outward to audiences. It does not, on its own, pull a complete local market into your site.