IDX vs DDF vs VOW

Canadian listing data reaches agent websites by three distinct routes: an IDX feed from your board, CREA’s national DDF pool, and the VOW lane for gated sold data. Vendors use the three acronyms interchangeably in sales copy, and they should not, because the feeds differ in what they contain, who grants them, and what kind of website each can power. Here is the three-way decision, feed by feed.

IDX: your board’s active listings, shown publicly

IDX is the reciprocity arrangement under which members of a board display each other’s active listings on their own websites, subject to the board’s display rules. The feed comes from your board, covers its full authorized active inventory, and updates on the board’s cadence — on a well-built platform that means minutes, not days. It is the default choice for an agent whose business lives inside one board’s footprint: complete local coverage, rich fields, public visibility, no registration wall. What it never includes is sold or off-market data. The Canadian buying guide for this lane is IDX websites Canada.

DDF: CREA’s national pool

The DDF is CREA’s Data Distribution Facility — a country-wide syndication pool fed by brokerages that opt their listings in. One application through CREA covers listings from many markets, which is genuinely useful for national franchise pages and directory-style products. The trade is depth: what flows through is essentially the REALTOR.ca public record, not the fuller field set your own board licenses, and the opt-in design means the pool is always a subset of any given market. A buyer comparing your DDF-powered search against a portal will eventually notice a listing that exists everywhere but on your site. We treat that trade honestly on our CREA DDF websites page, including the cases where DDF is the right call.

VOW: the gated full record

A VOW — virtual office website — is the lane that carries what public display rules keep off IDX: sold prices, historical transactions, and additional statuses, delivered to consumers who register on your site and accept its terms of use. The board grants it under its own agreement with stricter operating conditions, including enforced password expiry (90 days under TRREB’s rules). It is the only legitimate way to put sold data on a realtor’s website in Ontario, and it doubles as the strongest lead-capture mechanism in the business, because the registration wall is holding data buyers genuinely want. The mechanics live at what is a VOW.

The decision in practice

Match the feed to the shape of the practice. A local agent or team competing to be the search destination for one market wants a board IDX plus a VOW on the same domain: complete active inventory in public, sold data behind registration, one brand. That combination is the standard serious build, and the head-to-head reasoning is laid out in IDX vs VOW. A national brand page that needs breadth across dozens of markets — and can live with portal-level fields and opt-in gaps — is the case DDF was built for. What almost never makes sense is paying for national breadth while trying to win one city: DDF adds nothing inside a footprint your board feed already covers completely, and it subtracts freshness and depth.

Where BrokerFold stands

BrokerFold consumes direct board feeds and operates both lanes that matter for a local practice: IDX and VOW ship together on every plan, with TRREB live in production today — the feed syncs every 15 minutes, photos serve from our own CDN, and a listing publishes only when its details, coordinates, and images are complete. We do not consume DDF, and we would rather say so plainly than blur the acronyms: if your business genuinely needs the national pool, you need a DDF product; if it needs to win your own market, you need your board’s feeds, operated properly. That is the build we sell.