MLS Grid Integration
MLS Grid integration is built and configured for each client as part of a setup service. There is nothing to install or enable yourself. This page describes what the integration does so you can judge whether you want it.
What It Is
An automatic feed from MLS Grid into your FW Real Estate site: listings, photos, price changes, and withdrawals, kept in step without anyone re-typing them.
MLS Grid is a normalised RESO Web API service that resells access to many US and Canadian MLSs through a single interface. That makes it the usual choice for an agency that needs more than one board's data.
Why It Is a Service
The feed itself is the easy part. The work is the mapping. Every MLS names its fields differently, uses its own status vocabulary, and attaches its own licence conditions about what may be displayed and for how long. Getting that wrong does not produce an error — it produces a site full of listings that are subtly incorrect, or that breach the terms you signed with your board. The integration is therefore scoped per client against your feed, your board's rules, and your own field set.
How It Works Once Live
- Runs on a schedule. The site's own scheduled job fetches new and changed listings automatically. Nobody has to press anything.
- Feed fields are mapped onto yours. Setup pulls a sample of real records from your feed and maps its fields onto your property fields — including those your add-ons contribute — so imported listings look like the ones you enter by hand.
- Nothing runs until a sample has come back. Until your credentials have actually returned data, only loading a sample is available. A real import cannot be started against a feed that has never answered. A misconfigured feed should import nothing rather than something wrong.
- Each property type lands where you put it. The feed separates listings into property types — residential, land, commercial sale, commercial lease, and so on. Each type is directed to a category on your site, or excluded from the import entirely. That is how a site that only sells homes takes a feed that also carries farms and businesses.
- Updates follow the feed. A price change at the source becomes a price change on your site.
- What happens to a listing the feed stops sending is your choice — and by default, nothing happens. A listing missing from one run is not proof it is gone. A narrowed filter, an excluded bucket, or a run that stopped halfway all look identical from the site's side. The integration leaves such properties exactly as they are unless you specify otherwise: unpublish them, change their status, or delete them. Deletion is the only action nobody can undo, and it is never the default.
- Photos come across with listings and are resized to your configured image sizes on the way in. You choose whether photos are fetched only for listings that have none — the lighter setting and the usual one — or re-fetched on every run, which picks up a photo the agent has replaced at the source. Imported photos are stored as the feed supplies them.
- Large feeds arrive in batches. How many listings each batch carries is configurable, because photographs are what makes a batch heavy — a few hundred listings can mean several thousand images.
What We Need From You
- Your own agreement with the data provider. Credentials are issued to you, under your licence with the board or platform. They cannot be shared between sites.
- A decision about scope. Which offices, which property types, which statuses — feeds are usually larger than what a site should show.
- Your field priorities. Which feed fields matter to you, and what should happen where the feed is silent.
How to Order
Contact us with the feed you have access to and we will scope the work. If you do not have MLS Grid access yet, we can advise on what to ask your board or provider for.
Imported Listings Are Ordinary Properties
Once listings are in, they use your design, your search, your add-ons, and your URLs like anything else. The feed is a source, not a separate section of the site.
