CREA DDF websites

A CREA DDF website is a realtor site whose listings come from the Data Distribution Facility — CREA’s national, opt-in syndication pool — rather than from a board’s own data feed. It is the easiest listing integration in Canadian real estate to acquire, there is a mature vendor ecosystem around it, and it is the right product for a specific kind of site. BrokerFold does not build on DDF, so read this as a candid map of the category from a vendor with no DDF product to sell you.

What a DDF website actually contains

The pool holds listings that brokerages have chosen to share nationally, at roughly the field depth consumers see on REALTOR.ca: price, address, photos, public remarks, core details. That has three structural consequences. Coverage is opt-in, so your site shows a subset of any market rather than the whole of it. Fields are portal-grade, so the richer data a board licenses to its own members — the material that makes a search experience feel deep — is absent. And there is no sold lane at all: the pool is active listings only, with no path to the gated sold data a VOW provides. None of this is a flaw; it is the design. The DDF exists to move listings outward to many destinations, not to hand any one website a complete local market.

Who the national pool genuinely suits

Breadth is the product, so DDF fits builds where breadth beats depth. A franchise or referral brand that wants listings from thirty markets on one page. A directory or media site displaying inventory across regions where it holds no board memberships. An agent site in a market whose board feed a chosen platform cannot serve yet. For all of these, one national application and a plugin-friendly ecosystem is a real advantage, and the WordPress DDF walkthrough covers that route step by step — application, plugin lineages, display rules, and running costs. On fees, the honest summary as of mid-2026 is unchanged: the feed itself is free to members, while the technology providers who consume it pay CREA access fees that reach you through licence and service pricing.

Where a direct board feed wins

If the job is to be the search destination for your own market, the comparison stops being close. A board feed carries the complete active inventory of its territory — no opt-in gaps — with the fuller field set boards license their members, refreshed continuously rather than on an import schedule. It also opens the door DDF cannot: the VOW lane, where registration-gated sold data lives, which is both the data local buyers actually crave and the strongest registration driver an agent site can run. A buyer who finds a missing listing or a stale status once will file your site under “double-check on a portal,” and opt-in pools plus cron-based imports produce exactly those moments. The full three-way framing — board IDX, DDF, VOW, and which combination fits which practice — is on IDX vs DDF vs VOW.

Choosing between the two routes

Ask one question first: does this website need to win one market, or represent many? If the answer is many, evaluate DDF providers on the things that genuinely vary — display-rule compliance, import cadence, whether listings render on your domain in indexable pages — and go in with clear eyes about pool coverage in the markets you care about. If the answer is one market, buy the board-direct build: our Canadian IDX guide lists the questions that separate a licensed feed integration from a widget. BrokerFold’s own build is board-direct by conviction — TRREB live today with 15-minute sync, VOW included, photos on our own infrastructure — because for a local practice, depth is not a feature of the website; it is the website.