What is the CREA DDF?
The Canadian Real Estate Association Data Distribution Facility (CREA DDF) was designed to help real estate brokerages give their office listings additional exposure. Participating brokerages authorize their listings to be displayed on all websites that have access to the feed. Thousands of real estate websites have access to the feed, so by participating, a brokerage’s office listings are automatically displayed on thousands of websites. All in all, it’s a great marketing opportunity. If you operate a real estate brokerage, and you haven’t opted in to share your listings in the CREA DDF, I’d recommend you consider it.
How to setup a CREA DDF feed for your website:
- go to member.realtor.ca
- login
- click on “access ddf” button under CREA Data Distribution Facility
- click on “data feeds”
- click on “add data feed”
- in step 1 select “national shared pool”
- in step 2 select “i will be engaging a 3rd party”
- in step 3 select your provider from the list — if you’d like us to be your provider, select “Repliers”
- in step 4 enter your website url, ie: yourdomain.com
- in step 5 select “i want all listings”
- review and submit
How to display listings from the CREA DDF on your website (the hard way)
The CREA DDF, like most real estate feeds, uses the Real Estate Transaction Standard (RETS). If you’re a website developer and you have no experience using RETS, this means you’ll have to learn it and create an infrastructure to periodically update and store the data so that you can use it on your website. This will take you hundreds of hours. I know this because I did this and it took me hundreds of hours.
Feel free to read the 58-page technical documentation guide here and I’m sure you’ll see what I mean:
https://us.v-cdn.net/6029909/uploads/editor/ws/x5k2u5ys4o77.pdf
It doesn’t end there. You’ll have to contact CREA and get approved as a technology provider. In my experience, this took nearly a month.
How to display listings from the CREA DDF on your website (the easy way)
Fortunately, there are a number of vendors, like me, that have developed solutions to simplify displaying listings from the CREA DDF on your website.
Our solution is particularly useful for website developers, so if you’re a website developer or you’re a real estate agent working with a website developer, this may be of particular interest to you.
We developed a REST API for the CREA DDF, so that you can access the CREA DDF listings without having to learn RETS and without having to create an infrastructure. A REST API is a universal standard, not specific to the Real Estate industry, so most website developers are familiar with it. You can easily query the API for listing information in real-time and display it on your website.
Watch this short video I’ve prepared to see how easy it is to access CREA DDF listings using our REST API.
Check out www.repliers.io for more information. We specialize in saving developers time and money in building real estate websites and apps by doing most of the heavy lifting for them and eliminating infrastructure costs. Feel free to schedule a 30-minute meeting with me where I’ll be happy to demo our solution as well as answer any questions you may have. We also have a live chat feature and you can reach me directly via email (pat@repliers.io).
