If your website displays listings pulled from CREA’s Data Distribution Facility, every one of those listings must now show a “Powered by REALTOR.ca” badge linked back to the original listing on REALTOR.ca. If you manage your own site without a DDF technology provider, CREA puts that responsibility on you, not on a vendor. Most hand-built Canadian realtor sites do not have it.
By Cody Wise, Founder, Wise Media. Last updated 28 September 2026. This is general information about published CREA policy, not legal advice. Confirm your own obligations with CREA, your board and your brokerage.
Summary
- CREA’s DDF policy, last updated August 2026, requires all DDF listing content to display the Powered by REALTOR.ca badge, linked back to the original listing on REALTOR.ca.
- The requirement applies to Real Estate Advertising Websites, franchisors, partner sites and member websites. That is effectively every site showing DDF data.
- REALTORS who manage their own website without a DDF technology provider are responsible for ensuring the badge appears on every listing, and CREA has said it would be contacting those members.
- Advertising websites carry four more obligations most owners have never read: five required display elements per listing, a refresh at least every 24 hours, a prohibition on filtering listings without approval, and integration with CREA’s lead and analytics API.
- New technology providers pay a $1,500 CAD onboarding fee and are billed quarterly on the number of data feeds they operate.
Table of Contents
- What is the DDF and who does it bind?
- What must appear on every DDF listing you display?
- The badge, exactly
- The 24 hour refresh rule
- Who is responsible if you built the site yourself?
- What it costs to be a technology provider
- A compliance audit you can run in 20 minutes
- Common mistakes
- What this means if you are choosing or replacing a realtor website
- FAQ
What is the DDF and who does it bind?
The Data Distribution Facility is CREA’s national listing feed. It takes listing content that members have consented to distribute and pushes it out to websites, apps and portals across Canada. It is how a realtor in Calgary ends up with their listing visible on a brokerage site in Halifax, and it is how most Canadian agent websites get listing inventory without negotiating with a board directly.
CREA’s rules attach to the data, not to the website. The moment DDF listing content renders on your page, the display obligations come with it. CREA’s own documentation names four categories of site that are bound: Real Estate Advertising Websites, franchisors, partner sites and member websites.
| Site type | Typical example | Bound by DDF display rules |
|---|---|---|
| Member website | An individual REALTOR’s own site | Yes |
| Real Estate Advertising Website | A portal or lead-gen site under a REAW agreement with CREA | Yes, plus the additional REAW obligations below |
| Franchisor site | A national brand’s site | Yes |
| Partner site | A CREA partner displaying listing content | Yes |
| A site with no DDF data | A personal brand site with no listing feed | No, but trademark rules still apply |
Worth separating two things that get confused constantly. Whether you may use the words MLS® and REALTOR® in your branding is a trademark question, and we covered it separately. Whether you may display listings, and how, is a DDF question. Different rulebooks. A site can be clean on one and exposed on the other.
What must appear on every DDF listing you display?
Five elements. For Real Estate Advertising Websites, CREA’s documentation requires that each listing display the listing brokerage name, the listing agent name and title, plus anything provincial law requires; a link to the property on REALTOR.ca; a link to the property on the listing brokerage or listing agent website where one is provided; the DDF lead form from CREA’s API; and the Powered by REALTOR.ca badge.
- Attribution. “The listing brokerage name, the listing agent name and title, and any additional information that is required by provincial law/regulation.” In Alberta that provincial layer is RECA’s advertising rules, and they are not optional.
- A link to the property on REALTOR.ca. Not to REALTOR.ca generally. To that property.
- A link to the listing brokerage or agent’s own page for the property, where the feed provides one.
- The DDF lead form from CREA’s API. A generic contact form of your own is not a substitute.
- The Powered by REALTOR.ca badge. Covered in full below.
Two more REAW obligations sit alongside the display list and are easier to breach by accident. You must “display all listing content received in the DDF® Real Estate Advertising Website data feed unless approved by CREA to filter listing content,” and you may display that content “only on the website(s) and/or mobile applications identified in the Real Estate Advertising Website Agreement with CREA.”
Read those twice if you run a niche site. Building a luxury-only or condo-only portal on a full feed is filtering. Launching a second domain, a city microsite or a companion app on the same feed puts content somewhere the agreement does not name. Both are the kind of thing a developer does on a Tuesday without anyone raising it.
The badge, exactly
CREA publishes the badge as an SVG in English and French, and publishes the code snippet to use. The English asset reads “Powered by: REALTOR.ca” and the French asset reads “Alimenté par: REALTOR.ca”. CREA’s own snippet sets the image at 125 pixels wide, and the badge must link back to the original listing on REALTOR.ca.
- English asset:
https://www.realtor.ca/images/en-ca/powered_by_realtor.svg - French asset:
https://www.realtor.ca/images/fr-ca/powered_by_realtor.svg - Width in CREA’s published snippet: 125 pixels
- Link target: the original listing on REALTOR.ca, per CREA’s requirement. Do not link the badge to the REALTOR.ca homepage and call it done.
- Language: serve the French badge on French pages. If you operate a bilingual site, or a Quebec-facing one, this is not a nicety.
One spec floating around is not CREA’s
Several vendor help centres state the badge needs a minimum width of 90 pixels and a 1:1 ratio. That figure does not appear in CREA’s own badge documentation, and it does not match CREA’s published snippet, which sets a 125 pixel width on an asset that is not square. Use CREA’s snippet and CREA’s asset URLs. If a developer quotes you a different spec, ask which CREA page it came from.
This matters beyond one image tag. A compliance rule you cannot trace to the source is a rule you cannot defend, and Canadian real estate marketing advice is full of confidently repeated numbers that nobody has checked.
The 24 hour refresh rule, and why stale listings are the real exposure
CREA requires Real Estate Advertising Websites to “refresh their website at least once every 24 hours and remove all Listing Content that is no longer current after a refresh.” Not update. Remove.
This is the clause that quietly catches custom builds. A developer writes an import that adds and updates listings and never writes the delete path, because deleting records feels destructive and nobody asked for it. Six months later the site is showing sold and expired properties, which is a compliance breach, a consumer complaint waiting to happen, and in most provinces a regulator problem on top of the CREA one.
It is also a search problem. Indexed pages for properties that no longer exist generate soft 404 signals, waste crawl budget and produce the worst possible landing experience for someone arriving from Google or from an AI answer. We went through the data plumbing side of this in RESO Web API versus RETS for Canadian realtor websites, and the failure mode is the same: the feed protocol is usually fine, the sync logic is where sites break.
What a correct sync does
- Pulls the feed at least once per 24 hours, and in practice far more often.
- Adds new listings and updates changed ones.
- Removes listing content that is no longer current in the same run, rather than leaving it orphaned.
- Returns a proper status code for the removed URL and, where the property is genuinely gone, redirects to the relevant search or neighbourhood page rather than the homepage.
- Logs each run so you can prove the cadence if anyone asks.
Who is responsible if you built the site yourself?
You are. CREA states that REALTORS who are not using a DDF technology provider and are managing their own website are responsible for ensuring the badge appears on every listing, and that CREA would be contacting those members.
This is the single most commercially relevant line in the whole policy, because it describes a large and specific group: agents who had a site built once, by a freelancer or a local shop, on a custom feed integration, and who have had no vendor relationship since. There is no provider watching the policy page on their behalf. Nobody pushed an update when the badge requirement landed. The site has simply been out of step since, and the agent has no way of knowing.
| Your setup | Who watches the policy | Your exposure |
|---|---|---|
| Major platform vendor with DDF integration | The vendor | Low, but verify rather than assume |
| Brokerage-provided site | The brokerage’s vendor | Low on the feed, check any custom pages you added |
| Custom build, feed maintained by a developer on retainer | Nobody, unless it is in the retainer scope | Medium to high |
| Custom build, no active developer | Nobody | High. This is the group CREA named |
What it costs to be a technology provider
CREA charges new technology providers a $1,500 CAD onboarding fee before they can access the DDF, and bills providers quarterly based on the current number of data feeds they operate. Pricing tiers are set by the total number of feeds accessed, tier changes take effect at the start of each quarter, and the adjustment lands in the following billing cycle.
For an individual agent this is not your fee. It matters for two reasons. First, it tells you why vendor pricing works the way it does: your provider is carrying a per-feed cost and a quarterly tier, which is why “add a second site on the same feed” is rarely as free as it sounds. Second, if you are an agency or a brokerage considering building your own DDF integration rather than licensing one, the onboarding fee is the smallest number in the project. The real cost is the compliance surface described in this article, maintained indefinitely.
Our honest read, and we build these: unless you have a genuine product reason to own the integration, license it. The economics only work when the integration itself is the product.
A compliance audit you can run in 20 minutes
Open one listing page on your own site and work down this list. Four of the five display elements are visible without touching code.
- 1. Badge present? Is the Powered by REALTOR.ca badge on the page, on this listing, not only in the footer or on a single “data source” page.
- 2. Badge linked correctly? Click it. Does it land on this property on REALTOR.ca, or on the REALTOR.ca homepage.
- 3. Brokerage and agent attribution? Listing brokerage name, listing agent name and title, visible on the listing itself.
- 4. Provincial requirements? Whatever your provincial regulator requires on advertising, present. In Alberta, check against RECA’s rules.
- 5. REALTOR.ca property link? A link to this property on REALTOR.ca, separate from the badge link if your layout separates them.
- 6. Brokerage or agent site link? Present where the feed supplies one.
- 7. Lead form? Is the form on the listing CREA’s DDF lead form from their API, or a form your developer built.
- 8. Language? French badge on French pages.
- 9. Trademarks? MLS® and REALTOR® in uppercase with the registered symbol, and the certification mark statement present in the footer.
- 10. Stale listings? Search your own site for three properties you know sold more than a month ago. If any still resolve as live listing pages, your sync has no delete path.
- 11. Filtering? Are you displaying the full feed, or a subset. If a subset, do you have CREA’s approval in writing.
- 12. Extra properties? Is the feed rendering on any domain, subdomain or app not named in your agreement.
Items 10 through 12 are the ones that cost real money to fix, because they are architecture rather than markup. Items 1 through 9 are usually a template change.
Common mistakes
- Badge in the footer instead of on the listing. The requirement attaches to listing content. A single site-wide badge does not satisfy it.
- Badge linked to realtor.ca instead of to the property. The most common single failure, and a five minute fix.
- Assuming the vendor handles it. Ask your provider, in writing, to confirm badge placement, link target, the five display elements and the refresh cadence. If they cannot answer in a sentence each, that is your answer.
- Replacing the CREA lead form with your own. Usually done for design reasons or to push leads into a CRM. It removes a required element and breaks CREA’s analytics integration.
- Import with no delete path. The 24 hour rule requires removal of content that is no longer current, not just updates.
- Launching a second site on the same feed. Display is permitted only on the properties named in the agreement.
- Quietly filtering the feed. Price floors, single neighbourhoods, condos only. All filtering, all requiring approval.
- Trusting an uncited spec. If a number cannot be traced to a CREA page, do not build to it.
What this means if you are choosing or replacing a realtor website
Compliance belongs in the brief, not in the post-launch bug list. When we scope a realtor build, the feed integration is specified with the display elements, the refresh and delete behaviour, and the badge template written into the requirements, because retrofitting a delete path into a live listing database is more expensive than building it once.
- Ask any vendor to demonstrate compliance on a live client site, not to assert it. Open a listing, click the badge, check where it goes.
- Get the refresh and removal behaviour in writing, including what happens to the URL of a sold property.
- Confirm which domains and apps your agreement covers before anyone proposes a city microsite strategy.
- Keep the CREA lead form and integrate your CRM behind it rather than replacing it.
- Treat everything above as a floor, not a marketing plan. Compliance keeps you out of trouble. It does not generate a single lead.
The lead generation layer sits on top and is a separate conversation: a home valuation landing page that captures sellers, and a listing data strategy that survives AI search, where three of the four routes into assistant answers are closed to an individual agent.
FAQ
Does the Powered by REALTOR.ca badge have to be on every listing?
Yes. CREA’s requirement is that all DDF listing content displays the badge, linked back to the original listing on REALTOR.ca. A single badge in the site footer or on an attribution page does not meet it.
I built my own site. Is my developer responsible or am I?
CREA states that REALTORS who are not using a DDF technology provider and manage their own website are responsible for ensuring the badge is on every listing. Your contract with a developer is between you and them. It does not move the obligation.
How often does my site have to update listings?
CREA requires Real Estate Advertising Websites to refresh at least once every 24 hours and to remove all listing content that is no longer current after a refresh. Removal is explicit, not implied.
Can I show only luxury listings, or only one neighbourhood?
Not by default. CREA requires REAWs to display all listing content received in the feed unless CREA has approved filtering. If your site shows a curated subset, get the approval documented rather than assuming it is fine because it looks better.
Can I replace CREA’s lead form with my own?
The DDF lead form from CREA’s API is listed as a required display element for advertising websites, and CREA’s API also supplies lead and statistics analytics. Design around the form or route its submissions into your CRM rather than removing it.
What does it cost to access the DDF as a technology provider?
CREA charges new technology providers a $1,500 CAD onboarding fee and bills quarterly based on the number of data feeds operated, with tiers set by total feeds and tier changes taking effect at the start of each quarter. Individual agents do not pay this; their provider does.
Is this the same as IDX?
Related but not identical. IDX is the general term for displaying other members’ listings on a member site, and the rules vary by board. DDF is CREA’s national feed and carries its own national policy. You can be compliant with a board’s IDX rules and still be missing DDF display requirements.
Do the MLS and REALTOR trademark rules apply too?
Yes, separately. The marks are used in uppercase with the registered trademark symbol, and the certification mark statement belongs on the site. That is a trademark obligation that applies whether or not you display listings.
Conclusion
None of this is difficult. It is just unowned. A vendor-built site usually has it handled and a hand-built site usually does not, and the agent in the second group has no mechanism that would ever tell them. CREA named that group explicitly and said it would be reaching out.
Open one listing page. Check the badge, check where it links, check the attribution, then search for a property you know sold last spring. Twenty minutes will tell you whether you have a template fix or an architecture problem.
Want someone to check it properly?
Wise Media audits and rebuilds Canadian realtor websites with the feed integration specified up front: badge and attribution on every listing, a refresh and removal path that actually deletes, CREA’s lead form kept intact, and the search layer built on top rather than bolted on. Tell us about your site through our intake form, or see what is included in our website packages.
Sources: CREA, REALTOR.ca DDF policy and rules, last updated August 2026; CREA, DDF requirements for Real Estate Advertising Websites; CREA, Powered by REALTOR.ca logos and code snippets. General information about published policy, not legal advice. Confirm your obligations with CREA, your board and your brokerage.