DDF offers a new way to market your listings
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The Data Distribution Facility (DDF) offers REALTORS® a new way of marketing listings across the country. With the DDF, you’ll be able to distribute your listings through three different data feeds that will generate more online exposure.
The DDF is a marketing tool offered by the Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA) at no extra cost to members. It’s a permissions-based distribution system that starts with boards, then brokerages. As we’ve opted in to the service, it’s now available for individual brokerages to decide if and to what extent they’ll make the DDF available to representatives in their offices.
Through the DDF dashboard, participating brokerages (and if they so choose, their representatives), will be able to control their listing data feeds through a dashboard on their computer.
The DDF involves three different listing data feeds:
National Shared Pool/National Franchisor Pool – Participating brokerages can distribute their listings to franchisor and members websites across the country
Member Websites – Participating brokerages can receive a feed with only their representatives’ listings, and allow their representatives to display a feed with their own listings on their websites.
Third-Party Websites – Brokerages can distribute their listings to approved third-party websites, and they can choose to allow their representatives to do the same.
To date, 96 brokerages across the country have opted-in to the National Shared Pool and 74 brokerages are opting in to the National Franchisor Pool, including Sutton, Century 21 and Royal LePage. Another 40 boards have opted in to the Member Websites feed.
The third-party component has 49 brokerages opted-in, collectively distributing about 6,500 listings to websites like Zoocasa, Homefinder and Point2Homes. Recently approved third-party websites include Streetseed, HousingBlock, Realestatechannel and HomeHippo.
All data that flows through these feeds originates from the MLS® system. So if something in the listing has changed, the change only needs to be made within the system and the update will apply to the listing wherever it is being displayed. The integrity of the data is protected and consistently branded with the REALTOR® and MLS® branding.
CREA has created a DDF resource page which you can find in the Technology Products section of their www.realtorlink.ca homepage. There are documents and videos that explain more about how the DDF works, and a link to the DDF Training Centre. The Training Centre contains documents, tutorials, webinars, and a link to the DDF dashboard.
How can you make use of the DDF as an individual REALTOR®? First, your brokerage needs to opt in. If your brokerage does not opt in to the DDF, you will not be able to use it. Some brokerages, for example those that specialize in a highly localized, specific product type, may not need or want greater national exposure. If your brokerage has opted-in to the DDF, your broker will decide the level of access you’ll have.
There is also an analytics component to the DDF that will show you data on the number of times your listing has been viewed, when and from which websites.
Note that we held back the initial release of the DDF to our members after our IS staff identified some performance issues within the system. We brought these issues to CREA, and while we feel these issues have been resolved, this is a new program and some performance issues may still exist.