TRREB data feeds

TRREB does not hand out “the MLS feed.” It distributes the same underlying listing database through three separately licensed lanes — IDX, VOW and DLA — and which lanes your website vendor holds determines everything your site can show. BrokerFold consumes TRREB data directly as a registered PropTx vendor under all three agreements, so this page is the map from the operator’s chair: what each lane carries, how the data physically moves, and which parts of the machinery you should ask any provider about.

One database, three licences

Every lane draws on the same board database, but each licence defines its own slice and its own display conditions. IDX is the public display permission. VOW is the registered-visitor permission with the off-market layer attached. DLA is an internal-use licence that never touches a consumer page. The lanes are signed as separate agreements with separate scopes, which is why “do you have a TRREB feed?” is the wrong vendor question — the right one is “which TRREB lanes, and what do you do with each?” The general Canadian picture of how feed types differ is on IDX vs DDF vs VOW; this page stays inside TRREB’s fence.

IDX: the public lane

The IDX lane carries active listings cleared for open display: the inventory an anonymous visitor can browse on a TRREB IDX website with no login. It is a defined subset — active statuses, a licensed field list, board-mandated attribution — and it is the layer search engines can crawl, which makes it the foundation of any agent site’s traffic. What it never contains is sold history. On TRREB, no amount of IDX paperwork puts a sold price in front of an anonymous browser.

VOW: the registered lane

The VOW lane is the deep one. Alongside actives it carries the off-market universe — closed sales and leases with prices, plus expired, terminated, suspended and withdrawn records — and a richer field set than IDX licenses. The conditions ride with it: visitors must register, accept terms of use, and hold passwords that expire on TRREB’s 90-day clock, all of which the platform has to enforce server-side. Operated properly, this lane is what turns an agent site into the place clients do their sold-price research; the TRREB VOW website page walks through that experience end to end.

DLA: the lane nobody displays

The Data Licence Agreement covers internal business use — the data a brokerage’s own tooling may consume behind the scenes. It is not a display permission, and a compliant platform treats it that way: DLA data never renders on a public or registered consumer surface. If a website pitch implies extra on-site data “because we have DLA,” treat that as a red flag rather than a feature.

How the data actually moves

TRREB distribution runs through PropTx on the AMPRE platform, a RESO Web API. In practice a vendor authenticates per lane and queries for everything modified since its last checkpoint. BrokerFold’s pipeline polls on a 15-minute cycle around the clock, so new listings, price changes and status flips reach tenant sites on a minutes scale rather than overnight. Photos take a separate path: the feed points at board media servers, and board rules plus basic performance sense mean a serious vendor copies every image to its own infrastructure and serves optimized versions from there. Nothing on a BrokerFold site hot-links a board image host.

One more gate matters. A record arriving in the feed is not the same as a listing ready for a buyer: details, geocoded coordinates and processed photos land at different moments. We hold each listing back until all three are in place, because publishing half-hydrated pages is how sites end up with photo-less cards and mislocated map pins.

What this map means when you shop

Three questions separate real TRREB integrations from resold ones. Which lanes does the provider hold — IDX only, or VOW too? How does data move — a direct board API connection on a stated cadence, or a middleman’s export? And where do photos serve from? The paperwork side — who signs, in what order, and how long it takes — is its own process, covered on board data feed approval. Once you can name the three lanes, every vendor conversation about “MLS integration” gets shorter and considerably more honest.