How listings reach Zillow and Realtor.com

How does a listing actually get to a portal?

Three pipes, and it helps to know which one you are looking at. IDX, or Internet Data Exchange, is the arrangement under which MLS participants consent to display each other's listings on websites and apps they control. NAR's Policy Statement 7.58, effective 1 January 2026, sets the terms: the MLS must process an IDX feed request within five business days, must supply all active listings plus sold data from 1 January 2012 forward and non confidential pending data, and the participant's database must be refreshed not less frequently than every 12 hours. A VOW, or Virtual Office Website, is a broker site that puts data behind a consumer registration and a broker client relationship, which lets it show more than IDX does.

Syndication is the third pipe and the one that reaches the big consumer brands. Your MLS, or in some markets your brokerage directly, has an agreement to pass listing content to third party sites. NAR describes it plainly: many MLSs provide listing information to third party aggregators such as Realtor.com through syndication or similar agreements, unless the broker withholds consent. ListHub, operated by Move Sales, Inc., still runs this plumbing for a large part of the market, saying it serves over 60,000 brokerages and distributes to a network of more than 170 websites with updates every one to two hours. Zillow stopped taking ListHub data in April 2015 and has taken direct feeds since.

The practical consequence is that no portal is a place you upload anything. You edit the MLS record, the feed carries the change, and the portal redraws its page on its own schedule.

Who runs Realtor.com and who runs Zillow?

Realtor.com is operated by Move, Inc., a News Corp subsidiary, under what News Corp's fiscal 2026 annual report on Form 10-K, filed 7 August 2026, calls a perpetual agreement and trademark licence with the National Association of Realtors. That filing says the site sources listings primarily from direct relationships with MLSs and covers nearly 100 per cent of MLS listed for sale and rental properties. NAR is clear on the money in the other direction: no NAR member dues fund Realtor.com. The freshness claim is worth knowing because sellers ask. In its fiscal 2018 filing News Corp said around 95 per cent of for sale listings were updated at least every 15 minutes on average, and by fiscal 2020 that had tightened to every 10 minutes.

Zillow is an independent public company that takes MLS and broker feeds directly. It reported 239 million average monthly unique users in the second quarter of 2026, citing Comscore, in results released on 5 August 2026. News Corp, reporting the same day for its fiscal fourth quarter, put Realtor.com at 68 million average monthly unique users, down 6 per cent, and 297 million monthly average visits, which it described as a 33 per cent share of total visits to United States real estate portals. CoStar's Homes.com is the third serious entrant and runs a different bargain with agents: it states that buyers are connected directly with the listing agent of the property 100 per cent of the time.

Portal	How it gets your listing	What you control	Published audience figure
Zillow and Trulia	Direct MLS and broker feeds	MLS record, plus paid placement products	239m average monthly unique users, Q2 2026, Comscore
Realtor.com	Direct MLS feeds via Move, Inc. under a NAR licence	MLS record, plus paid ad tiles in search results	68m average monthly unique users, quarter to June 2026
Homes.com	MLS feeds, CoStar operated	MLS record, listing agent always shown	110m average monthly unique visitors for the network, Q4 2024, Google Analytics
Broker and agent sites	IDX feed under Policy Statement 7.58	MLS record and the seller's display opt outs	Refreshed at least every 12 hours

What can a seller actually switch off?

More than most agents offer them, and it is a conversation worth having at the listing appointment rather than after. Policy Statement 7.58 bars an MLS from excluding listings from IDX except where a seller has affirmatively directed that their listing or property address not appear on the internet. Around that sit three separate seller choices the policy requires MLSs to support: withholding the address or the whole listing from internet display, disabling third party comments or reviews on the listing page, and disabling any automated estimate of market value.

Those are four different switches and they have four different costs. Suppressing the address removes the listing from map search, which is how most buyers look. Turning off the automated valuation removes a number that will otherwise appear next to your asking price. Turning off comments removes a channel you cannot moderate. Each one is a legitimate seller instruction, and each one needs to be recorded in the MLS field rather than in an email to you.

Systems name these fields differently, which is where agents get caught. CRMLS carries a field called Internet Entire Listing Display, and its guidance, updated 29 May 2026, explains that once a listing is finalised as closed, leased, cancelled or expired, only the primary photograph remains visible on third party sites regardless of what the setting says. That behaviour surprises sellers who expect the whole gallery to disappear at closing.

Delayed marketing is a fifth switch and a different mechanism. Under NAR's Multiple Listing Options for Sellers policy, a delayed marketing exempt listing sits in the MLS and is visible to every participant while the outward flow through IDX and syndication is held back for a period your MLS sets. The rules around that are set out in the Clear Cooperation Policy explained.

Why is my listing wrong on the portal?

Work backwards from the feed. A listing that is missing, showing the wrong price, showing the wrong agent, showing an old status or missing its photographs is almost always reflecting the MLS record faithfully, and the fastest fix is to correct the MLS and wait a refresh cycle rather than to email the portal.

Timeliness rules exist precisely because stale data is the common failure. NAR's model MLS rules require price changes and listing modifications to be filed within 24 hours excepting weekends and holidays, contingency resolutions and cancellations within 24 hours, and cancellation of a pending sale reported immediately with the listing reinstated immediately. The window for reporting a status change and sale price is left blank in the model for each MLS to fill in, so the number is local. Enforcement is local too. Stellar MLS in Florida publishes fines of $500 to $5,000 for serious violations with no warning first, $25 a week for a violation left uncorrected for up to 30 days, and a $250 reinstatement fee if fines go unpaid, under its Article 11.4 on penalties for inaccurate or incomplete data.

Two failures genuinely are not the MLS. A listing suppressed by a portal for breaching that portal's own access rules is one. Since April 2025 Zillow has published listing access standards saying that a listing publicly marketed to any buyer must be in the MLS and published on Zillow as well as other sites that receive MLS feeds, and that a listing which breaches this will not be published on Zillow and Trulia for the life of the listing. The other is a photograph set that never syndicated because it never met the MLS media rules in the first place, which is covered in real estate listing photo standards.

What do the portals sell, and what do you get for nothing?

Distribution is free. Your listing reaches Zillow, Realtor.com and Homes.com because it is in the MLS, and no agent pays for that. What the portals sell is placement and attention around listings, which is a different product and needs to be described honestly to a seller who asks why a competitor's face is on your listing page.

Realtor.com's Local Expert product places branded ads in the fourth and tenth tiles of search results pages in a purchased city or postcode. Zillow's Showcase is a paid upgrade to the listing presentation itself, launched in 2023 and deliberately capped so that it does not exceed 10 per cent of listings in a market, with more than 50 brokerages signed up as of a 30 September 2025 announcement. Zillow launched Preview on 17 March 2026 to surface pre market listings, and from 5 May 2026 announced that Preview listings would also appear on Realtor.com.

None of that changes the underlying job. The listing that performs is the one whose record is complete, whose status is current and whose description and photographs agree with each other, because that is the object every one of these systems is redistributing. Getting that record right the first time is covered in how to write an MLS listing description.

Frequently asked questions

How long does a change take to appear on Zillow?

There is no single published number, and any agent quoting one is guessing. IDX databases must be refreshed at least every 12 hours under NAR policy, News Corp has told the SEC that most Realtor.com listings update within 10 to 15 minutes, and Zillow does not publish a cadence. Make the change in the MLS, give it a business day, and escalate to your MLS rather than the portal if it has not landed.

Can I upload a listing straight to Zillow?

Not as an agent representing a seller in an MLS market. Your listing reaches the portals through the MLS feed, and a for sale by owner path exists for unrepresented sellers only. If your listing is absent, the question is whether the MLS record is active, whether the seller has opted out of internet display, and whether a delayed marketing or portal access rule is holding it back.

Whose name shows on the listing page?

That depends on the portal's own business model rather than on your MLS. Homes.com states that it connects buyers with the listing agent every time. Zillow and Realtor.com both sell advertising placements to other agents, which is why a buyer can call about your listing and reach somebody else. Tell sellers this before they discover it.

Does opting out of internet display protect a seller's privacy?

Partially, and it costs real exposure. A seller can withhold the address or the entire listing from internet display, and the MLS must honour that, but the listing still reaches every cooperating broker through the MLS itself. Explain both halves of the trade in writing, because a seller who later sees the reduced buyer pool will remember the conversation differently.

Sources

Last verified: 2026-09-02