Whether closed, expired and withdrawn listings stay on your site is decided by two fields on each import task: Select Status and Protected Statuses. Between them they answer both questions the daily reconciliation pass asks.
Neither field deletes anything on its own. They tell the daily pass what to do when a listing’s situation changes.
Can our brokerage website show sold listings from the MLS?
Yes, in most markets, but your MLS decides. Your board’s rules say which sold homes you may show, if you may show the sale price, and how long they may stay up. MLS Import can only pull the sold listings your feed carries. So ask your board first, then set up the import.
Ask your MLS these four questions before you turn anything on:
- Does our feed include Closed listings, or only active and pending ones?
- May we show the sale price? In some states, sale prices are not public record. There, many boards hide the price or leave sold homes out.
- How far back may we show sales, and when must we take them down?
- Do sold homes need their own disclaimer or the listing broker’s name?
| Step | Who does it |
|---|---|
| Say yes to sold listings on your site | Your MLS and your broker |
| Pull closed listings and keep them | MLS Import, with Select Status and Protected Statuses |
| Show a clear Sold label | Your theme or Standalone mode, using the status field |
| Disclaimer and courtesy of text | You, in your theme |
See MLS display rules for the flags and attribution fields you set on each import task.
How to use sold listings for market reports and seller leads
Keep sold listings as their own pages, then point sellers to them. MLS Import pulls the closed listings in and keeps them. You build the recent-sales page and the seller form on your own site. Here is the setup, step by step.
- Open an import task and set it to keep closed listings, as shown under Keeping closed listings below. Use the city, price or postal code filters to keep it to your farm area.
- Label those pages Sold, and keep them out of your for-sale search. Buyers should never think a sold home is still open.
- Make a “Recent sales in your neighborhood” page. Most real estate themes let a list or search page show just one property status.
- If your board allows the sale price and your feed carries it, turn that field on in the Select Import fields screen. The plugin cannot show a price your feed does not send.
- Put a “What is my home worth?” form on that page. In Standalone mode, use the Contact Form block, and send the leads to your CRM.
- Turn on Alerts. It records a sold event when the MLS sends a listing as closed, so your daily email shows what just sold in the areas you follow.
Want charts like median sale price? Work out the numbers from your sold listings and add them to the page yourself. Check first that your MLS lets you publish them.
Use your own neighborhood photo at the top of a recent-sales page, so it never looks empty when sold-listing photos stop loading.
The two questions reconciliation asks
Once a day the plugin fetches the full list of listing identifiers currently in your MLS and compares it against the properties on your site. Each property falls into one of two cases.
- The listing is still in the MLS. It is kept when its status is one of the statuses in Select Status. If the MLS moved it to a status you did not select, it is removed, because it no longer belongs to what that task imports.
- The listing has left the MLS entirely. It is removed, unless its status is one of the statuses in Protected Statuses.
So Select Status governs listings that are still in the feed, and Protected Statuses governs listings that have gone from it.
Keeping closed listings
Sold history is the usual reason people want closed listings, and it takes both fields.
- Add
Closedto Select Status so closed listings are imported and so a listing that moves from active to closed is kept rather than removed. - Add
Closedto Protected Statuses so the property survives the day the MLS stops publishing it. Feeds drop closed listings after a retention window that the MLS sets. - Click Update. The daily pass reads the task’s current settings, so the change applies to properties this task already imported.
Leave Closed out of both and closed listings are imported never or removed quickly, depending on which field you left it out of. Expired or withdrawn listings are off limits almost everywhere. See can I get in trouble for showing expired or sold homes.
There is no timed retention setting. You cannot ask the plugin to keep sold listings for three years, because how long a listing remains available is decided by your MLS feed. Protecting the status keeps the property for as long as you keep the setting, which is the closest equivalent.
Removing off-market listings
If sold homes still show as active and you are not sure which of these is the cause, walk through why sold homes still show active on your site.
The reverse case is a site showing pending or closed properties that should have gone.
- Remove the status from Protected Statuses. A protected status is never deleted, whatever else is configured, so this is the first thing to check.
- Remove the status from Select Status as well, so a listing that moves into it while still in the feed is taken down at the next daily pass.
- Confirm the daily job is running at all. Nothing is ever removed on a site where cron does not fire.
- For properties already on the site that you want gone now, delete them from MLS Import Settings, Tools, by selecting the property status taxonomy and the terms to remove.
Statuses differ between MLSs
Both dropdowns are filled from the statuses your own MLS publishes, so the wording is theirs. Some boards use Active Under Contract where others use Pending, and some publish statuses such as Hold, Cancelled or Expired that others never send.
This matters more than it sounds. If the MLS moves a listing to Active Under Contract and that status is not in your Select Status list, the listing is removed from the site while it is still very much in the MLS. Selecting every status you want visible, not only Active, is what prevents that.
A property whose owning import task has been deleted has no status rules left to consult. It is kept while it stays in the feed and removed once it leaves, with no protection available. Keep the task if you want its listings governed.
Frequently asked questions
Does MLS Import cost extra to show sold listings?
No. MLS Import is $49 a month per site with every feature included, and you get 30 days free. Closed listings use the same import task settings as active ones. Your MLS may charge its own feed fee, and some boards only send sold data if you ask.
Do I have to delete and re-import after changing these settings?
No. The daily pass reads each task’s current settings when it runs, so a change applies to the properties that task already imported. Re-importing is only needed when you want listings that the old filters never brought in.
Why did my active listings disappear after an MLS status change?
Their status changed to one that is not in Select Status, so the daily pass treated them as outside the task’s scope. Add the status your MLS moved them to, and re-import to bring them back.
Are deleted properties recoverable?
Not from the trash, because reconciliation removes them at database level along with their MLS image links. If the listing is still in the MLS, correcting the status settings and re-importing brings it back as a new property.
Does a closed listing keep its photos?
Only while the MLS keeps serving them. Photos are never copied into your media library, so a protected closed property stays on the site as a page with its data, and its images stop loading once the MLS stops publishing them.
Related
- Protected statuses
- How daily reconciliation works
- Controlling which listings are imported
- Import History and the activity log
Tell us which statuses your MLS publishes and what you want kept, and we will tell you exactly what to select.
