When a buyer searches for homes on a portal, the listings they see didn't come directly from a brokerage's website. They came through a data feed: a scheduled, automated transfer of listing information from a central database to dozens of portals at once.
That feed runs quietly in the background. Most brokerages never think about it. And that's exactly the problem.
How the feed works
In Canada, most residential listings flow through CREA's Data Distribution Facility (DDF). A brokerage enters a listing into their board system, that data gets added to the DDF, and portals like Realtor.ca and third-party sites pull from it on a schedule. That schedule might be every 15 minutes, every hour, or once a day depending on the portal.
What can go wrong
The feed breaks and nobody notices. A formatting error, a labeling mismatch, or a server timeout can stop data from flowing. Your listing appears as it was hours or days ago, with no alert to anyone.
Fields don't line up correctly. The DDF uses specific field names for things like property type, status, and square footage. When a portal interprets those fields differently, listings appear in the wrong category, with missing photos, or with a status that says active when the property closed three weeks ago.
Photos fail silently. Photo transfers are handled separately from listing data. A listing can appear with accurate text and zero photos because a photo upload hit an error that was never surfaced to anyone at the brokerage.
What it costs
Wrong data doesn't generate complaints. It generates silence. A buyer sees a listing with no photos and clicks past it. A listing shows the wrong price and the buyer assumes it sold. A property shows as available and a buyer calls only to find it closed months ago.
That last one damages trust in a way that's hard to recover from. And none of it shows up in any report because the problem never gets traced back to its source.
The fix
Most of this is preventable with monitoring. The feed should be checked regularly for errors, field completeness, and status accuracy. It takes setup time upfront. After that, it runs in the background and flags problems before a buyer finds them first.