MLS Reciprocity website

MLS Reciprocity is the program under which BC’s Lower Mainland boards let each member’s website display every participating brokerage’s listings — the reason your site can carry the full active market rather than only your own inventory. It is the tri-board answer to what other regions call IDX, run jointly by the Greater Vancouver, Fraser Valley, and Chilliwack & District boards on their shared MLS, and formally styled MLS® Reciprocity, trademark and all. The concept is generous and the paperwork is real: display rights come bundled with some of the most specific presentation rules in Canadian real estate, and a website either ships them correctly by default or quietly runs offside.

What the program actually is

Reciprocity is exactly what the name says: participants agree to let their listings appear on each other’s websites, mediated by the boards. Consumers get full-market search on any member’s site; members get a site worth visiting; listing brokerages get their attribution carried everywhere their listings travel. Participation runs on agreements between the member, their brokerage and the board, and it covers active, internet-approved listings — a seller who declines internet display stays off member sites entirely. The registered-visitor world of sold prices and off-market records is a separate program with separate rules, covered on BC sold data rules.

The display contract, specifically

Four requirements do most of the work, and every one is prescribed rather than suggested:

• The logo. The official Reciprocity mark appears at the top of every results page at no less than the mandated minimum size, with a smaller variant permitted on thumbnails. Official asset only — redrawing or recolouring it is itself a violation.

• The disclaimer, verbatim. Every thumbnail and detail display carries the boards’ notice, word for word:

  NOTE: This representation is based in whole or in part on data generated by the Chilliwack & District Real Estate Board, Fraser Valley Real Estate Board or Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver which assumes no responsibility for its accuracy.

  Two details reveal whether a vendor has actually read the rulebook. The text still names the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver — the pre-2024 name — because verbatim means verbatim. And the registered-visitor surface carries a near-identical notice that differs by a single letter (“assume” for “assumes”), so a platform has to pin both texts exactly rather than paraphrase one.

• Attribution. The listing brokerage’s name rides on every card, and detail pages carry the member’s name, the logo and the MLS copyright immediately after the property information — at the same colour and at least the size of the largest type used for listing data. Burying attribution in grey six-point type is explicitly not an option.

• Restraint. Results pages cap at 50 listings; days on market and the listing date stay off public pages; MLS listings never co-mingle with non-MLS inventory in one results list; and no one but the listing brokerage gets contact info or branding inside the listing body.

Why this is a platform’s job

None of these rules is difficult individually. What makes them a platform concern is that they must hold on every page, through every redesign, forever — and that the boards can require changes to a member’s site on a two-week clock, which is not a cadence for a custom-coded template and a busy agent. On BrokerFold, the chrome is generated at render time from the listing’s board: the logo, the byte-pinned disclaimers, the attribution block at its prescribed colour and size, the page caps. Change templates, change brands, change nothing about compliance. The engineering underneath — the per-record and per-field licence gating that decides what may render at all — is covered on the GVR IDX page.

Getting a Reciprocity website

The sequence is short: you are a member of one of the three boards, your brokerage signs off, the display agreements are executed with the board, and your platform serves the feed under them — BrokerFold’s data plane speaks the tri-board feed natively today, with the display layer above shipped as default behaviour, and the board relationship stays yours while we carry the vendor side. The one-paragraph definition lives in the glossary; the decision-grade question for any vendor is simpler: show me the logo, the disclaimers and the attribution on your rendered pages, exactly as the rulebook words them.