MLS data licence

An MLS data licence is the agreement under which a real estate board permits its listing data — details, photos, and in some tiers sold information — to appear on a website. It is the legal object behind every legitimate listing display in Canada, and the word that matters in it is licence: the board grants conditional display rights and keeps ownership, a distinction unpacked in who owns MLS listing data. Understanding what the licence is, what tiers it comes in, and what it actually governs is the fastest way to evaluate any website vendor’s claims — because everything a listings website does ultimately happens inside this document’s permission.

Why your website needs one

There is exactly one lawful route for board listing data onto your site, and this is it. Without a licence in place, listing content gets there by copying or scraping, which violates board rules and copyright at once — the full anatomy of that mistake is in is scraping MLS listings legal. The licence is also why “we’ll just add MLS listings” is never a checkbox on a real vendor’s onboarding: data appears after paperwork clears, not after a plugin installs. A platform that gets listings onto your domain without ever involving your board and your broker of record is answering the compliance question by not asking it.

The licence tiers, and what each buys you

Boards typically split data access into tiers, each its own agreement with its own conditions. IDX licenses active listings for public display — the tier that puts a searchable map of the market on your site for anyone to browse. VOW licenses a fuller dataset, including sold and off-market data, for display only to registered visitors who accept terms of use — the tier behind every “see sold prices” experience in Canada, and the one with the most operating conditions attached. Back-office data licences (TRREB calls its version the DLA) cover internal uses like analytics and tooling, and permit no public display at all. Most serious agent sites run IDX and VOW together: public search plus gated sold data on one domain. Choosing between the display tiers is its own decision, laid out in IDX vs VOW.

What the licence actually governs

Reading one of these agreements as a vendor is instructive, because the licence reaches far past “you may show listings.” It dictates display conduct: attribution and identification, which fields may render publicly, and how quickly your site must reflect feed changes. It dictates operations: VOW terms mandate registration mechanics, credential expiry windows, and access logging your platform has to run correctly every day. It constrains what may be built from the data — derivative products and, in current TRREB-side paperwork, AI processing of feed content are restricted, a boundary with daily consequences described in ChatGPT for realtors. And it ends: licences terminate, at which point the data must come down. Details like photo handling follow the same logic — the images are licensed works, and a platform is expected to serve them responsibly from its own infrastructure rather than treating the board’s systems as a free CDN. Every one of these clauses is invisible on a working site and expensive on a broken one, which is precisely why the licence, not the design, is where vendor quality shows.

Who signs, and in what order

The licence is a chain with three links: the member whose site it is, the broker of record whose countersignature makes it valid, and the technology vendor authorized by the board to deliver and process the feed. The paperwork is per member and per registered website, so a brokerage’s agreement does not cover your personal site — the split that surprises most agents, explained in do agents need their own IDX agreement. The mechanics of the filing itself, and why the broker’s signature queue is the usual critical path, are covered from the vendor’s chair in board data feed approval; the schedule implications for a launch are in the website launch timeline.

What it costs, and what to ask a vendor

At the board layer, often little: TRREB charges members no separate fee for its IDX or VOW datafeeds, while some Ontario boards price VOW access — the sourced figures live in how much an MLS data feed costs. The real cost is the platform that turns a licence into a working site, which reframes the buying question. Ask any vendor: which agreements will I sign, whose authorization does the feed ride on, what VOW conditions do you operate on my behalf, and what happens to the data if we part ways? A good platform answers in plain sentences, because it lives inside these documents daily. We sign them as a technology vendor across the boards we serve, and our consistent experience is that the licence is where real estate websites are actually won or lost — everything visible on the page is downstream of it.