After receiving a lot of attention several years ago, CREA’s Data Distribution Facility, or DDF®, is up and running and being used by brokers and salespeople across Canada.
What is the DDF®?
It is an online service available exclusively to CREA members, at no charge. It expands your access to a national pool of listings, gives you control over where your listings go, and helps you drive and measure traffic to your listings, whether they are on your website or a third party site.
Participation in the DDF® is optional – members wishing to be part of it set up their accounts and manage their accounts. However, the Broker of Record must opt in first. Without the Broker of Record’s agreement to participate, no member of that office may participate.
There are three modules and four parts to the DDF®: the National Shared Pool and the National Franchisor Pool (Module 1), Member Website Feeds (Module 2) and Third Party Destinations (Module 3).
Module 1
The National Shared Pool (NSP)
Brokers of Record contribute their listing content to a shared national data pool and, if they decide, they receive a feed from that pool to display all other participant’s listings on their websites. Salespeople in that Broker of Record’s office or company may also choose to receive a feed of listing content from the National Shared Pool.
Brokerages and salespeople operating a National Shared Pool website will be able to filter the listing content they receive based on objective criteria, such as waterfront properties or acreages or condominiums.
At the end of June, 2014, the National Shared Pool had 129,200 listings and 1100 brokerage owners participating.
National Franchisor Pool (NFP)
Brokers of Record put their listings in this pool. Corporate franchisors populate their websites with all the listings of participating brokerage owners in the National Franchisor Pool.
At the end of June, there were nine franchisors accessing the National Franchise Pool: Better Homes and Gardens Canada, Century 21, Coldwell Banker, Exit Realty, Keller Williams Realty, Realty Executives, RE/MAX Ontario-Atlantic Canada, Royal LePage and Sutton Real Estate.
The pool had 113,700 listings and 936 brokerage owners participating.
Module 2
Member Website Feeds
Brokers of Record and salespeople can receive a data feed of their own listings to populate their own websites.
At the end of June, 113,600 listings were being sent to 1468 data feeds used to populate member websites.
Module 3
Third Party Destinations
Brokers of Record and salespeople can populate CREA-approved real estate websites with their listings.
At the end of June, 112,100 listings from 995 brokerages were sent to 15 real estate websites.
The Third Party Destination module is similar to RAHB’s own arrangement with Point2 to syndicate listings to third party real estate websites – and in fact, CREA is also using Point2. RAHB’s agreement with Point2 provides a wider variety of third party destinations, however, so members may wish to continue using RAHB’s upload to Point2.
(NOTE: RAHB members who subscribe to Point2 Agent may have difficulty accessing the CREA DDF®. RAHB and Point2 are investigating the situation.)
Find out more about the CREA DDF® – use the Data Distribution Facility Training Centre or Access the Data Distribution Facility buttons on the left had side of the RAHB home page in REALTOR Link®.