With the landscape of listings, platforms, and portals shifting we often get asked many questions about specific edge cases ("what if...") and while we cannot address every unique situation proposed to us, we can provide guidelines on what the best practices are for an easy normal listing experience. We've included several tables of facts (portals, statuses, etc.) that will prove useful as you manage and maintain your listings. There is also a brief FAQ and a collection of Article Reference Links that will provide even more useful information.  

Throughout this article, the term "SFAR" means precisely the San Francisco Association of REALTORs as the professional association, and "SFARMLS" means the Multiple Listing Service owned and operated by SFAR. 

Before You Are On-Market

There is a period of time before a listing is on-market and visible to the public. In SFARMLS the period before you are on-market has a few phases that line up fairly well with the current 'consumer-choice' focused strategies published nationally.

A listing you have in a Private/Exclusive Status should conform with your brokerage’s risk management requirements for documentation and only needs to be entered into SFARMLS (as a Coming Soon or Active status listing) when the marketing for the listing goes outside your own brokerage. Communication with clients that is one-to-one (1:1) in nature, ie SMS/text messages, phone calls, personally written emails are not public marketing and do not require you to submit the listing.

Immediate MLS submission is not mandatory. California REALTORS® must obtain signed C.A.R. forms (MLSA/SELI) to retain a listing as an Office Exclusive (often referred to as a Private Exclusive, which means the same thing). These forms confirm that the sellers understand what the MLS is and have chosen to delay or opt out of open market exposure.

When a listing in Private/Exclusive status is publicly marketed (through signage, open showings visible to non-office agents, or broad “one-to-many” methods such as flyers, social media, or email blasts), it ends the Private/Exclusive period; this applies regardless of who disclosed the listing’s existence. At that point, SFARMLS subscribers are required to enter the listing into the MLS in accordance with the rules and regulations agreed to upon joining.

IMPORTANT: If a listing in Private/Exclusive status is broadly marketed (whether through email blasts, public signage, or showings visible to agents outside your office) that activity ends the Private/Exclusive period. It doesn’t matter who disclosed the listing’s existence; once public marketing has occurred, SFARMLS Rules & Regulations require that the listing be entered into the MLS within one business day.

The SFARMLS Coming Soon status is an appropriate way to manage this - the listing is submitted, but DOM accumulation does not start and the listing is not eligible to be displayed publicly on "IDX" (or other marketing) type sites. Entering your listing as Coming Soon in the SFARMLS makes it visible to other agent members searching directly inside the MLS (and the Zenlist App) but does not automatically make it visible to the public or any brokerage or marketing portal.

Coming Soon, Explained

Coming Soon listings are not an Active or “On Market” status. This means that they are submitted to the MLS but will not be included in the data feeds for public marketing, marketing portals, on cooperating brokerage portals, or other marketing sites that receive data originating from SFARMLS. 

Entering your listing as Coming Soon makes it visible to other agent members searching directly inside the MLS, and the Zenlist App, and it can make it visible to agents (and their clients) searching within your own brokerage platform tools (if your brokerage company has opted to receive it).

Beginning in late August of 2025, Coming Soon status listings will be distributed in specific types of licensed data feeds for application use and in all broker platform feeds. SFARMLS Coming Soon listings...

• will be included in Virtual Office Website (VOW) feeds and all configurations of Broker Platform Feeds (BBO).
• have not, and will not, appear in Internet Data eXchange (IDX) feeds.

Additionally, VOW and BBO licensed data feeds will include specific terms of use that have explicit data handling and privacy rules that must be followed for the data license to remain valid.

You can read more about feed licensing types here. 

TIP: Because a valid Coming Soon listing is fully submitted to SFARMLS you can be confident that your seller's listing will be eligible to appear on public listing search and display portals without exception, if you and your seller decide to set Publish To Internet = YES, and the current date is greater than or equal to the On-Market Date (OMD). You and your seller have full control over this setting.

The maximum future OMD that you can set is equal to the listing agreement's Expiry Date. Per AB1345 passed in 2023, there are legal limitations in California regarding the length of a listing agreement.

The On-Market Date (OMD) is Really Important

There is the date a listing agreement is signed with the selling parties and for the SFARMLS we refer to this as the “List Date” and during entry will ask for both the beginning date of the listing (date signed) and the expiration date of the listing. Within your agreement is a mechanism or agreement regarding a date when the listing will begin to be “publicly marketed”, fully MLS marketed, publicly visible in the MLS or other similar terms. This date is the “On-Market Date” (OMD).

As with other information entered in the MLS, the OMD must match your written agreements with the seller. 

The On Market Date (OMD) controls when the listing will go to an Active status.

The choice you make with the setting for Publish to Internet will control if the listing is included in public marketing feeds for wide distribution across the internet. If you select = “Yes” when entering the listing, then the listing will be included in public marketing feeds when the OMD is reached. Once a listing has been published in the Active status and included in the public marketing feeds, it cannot be undone. 

A listing can only go from the Coming Soon status to the Active status, and once in the Active status it can not go “backward” to the Coming Soon status. Once in the Active status the status should be updated in a timely fashion as the listing moves through its regular status lifecycle. 

Once a listing has been marked Active the valid next statuses in a normal lifecycle are: 

• CONTINGENT (whether "show" or "no show" and Days on Market continues to accrue)
• HOLD (to pause Days on Market and do some work before resuming on-market behaviors)
• PENDING (also stops DOM and signals that there is an offer in the works)
• CANCELED (either automatically on the listing's entered Canceled Date, or by the Agent affirmatively by taking action to set that status in the event of an early cancelation agreed upon by a seller). 
• 
  

TIP: If you want to take your listing public earlier than first thought, you only need to revise your listing and update the Status information making the OMD sooner than previously entered, or by setting it to the current date and selecting "Active" from the status dropdown.

Distributing Your Listings - AS OF TODAY

The SFARMLS system today has a set of required YES/NO fields for managing listing distribution. Right now setting PublishToInternet to NO automatically sets all other values to NO (or disables them, since the listing is not distributed). As it works today, turning the listing off removes it from IDX and VOW feeds and from almost all BBO feeds (if a brokerages asks for a dedicated data feed of just their own data, the listings are included in that).

This is what the switches currently look like (July 2025):

Distributing Your Listings - AFTER CHANGES TO UI & FEED (scheduled late August, 2025)

There are two switches that control the distribution of a listing. As the system works today the two switches are tied together so that any listing set to distribute goes to both IDX (public display sites) and VOW/BBO (application feeds for use in back-office applications) see the block above for how this works today. 

Starting in August 2025, the two switches will be able to be set independently (but with one dependency) with these functions:

Publish To Internet (Yes/No)

YES - the listing is eligible for display on IDX sites if it is in an active listing status (on market) and the current date is greater than or equal to the On-Market Date. 

NO - the listing is not included in the pool of listings for display publicly on IDX sites (and portals with public listing searches). The listing may still be included in VOW and BBO licensed feeds. 

Show To VOW (Yes/No) 

YES - the listing is included in VOW and BBO feeds. If the Publish To Internet value is also set to YES, and the current date is greater than or equal to the On-Market Date, it will show publicly.

NO - the listing is not included VOW and BBO feeds, and further, the value in Publish To Internet is also effectively NO, regardless of the value you set.

This means it will not be included in the pool of listings for display publicly on IDX sites, nor will it be included in VOW or BBO feeds of all listings in the MLS. A Participant is eligible to receive a data feed of their OWN listing data, and listings that are Show to VOW = NO can be included in that specific feed of JUST their own listing data.

Note: These switches do not disable deep reciprocal datashare with the other MLSs of the NORCAL MLS ALLIANCE.

Pending / Closing

Update the listing’s status to Pending as soon as appropriate so it aligns with the documented dates and accurately reflects the transaction’s real-world progress. A Pending listing indicates that the property is in escrow (or will be shortly) and all buyer contingencies have been removed. When the escrow has closed, the status should be updated to Closed.

Sometimes a listing falls out of escrow; perhaps due to an unmet contingency or an unforeseen situation. In such cases, the status may revert to Active or be changed to Canceled. These transitions are normal. 

Exercise caution if you plan to cancel a listing with the intent to immediately re-list it as Coming Soon or New, this may not be permitted. Carefully evaluate your options before proceeding and be sure that you are in compliance with your broker's risk management policies before proceeding.

Reciprocal MLS Considerations

The deep reciprocal datashare MLS partners receive listings even if they are set to NO in the flags for PublishToInternet or ShowToVow (see the blocks above for Distributing Your Listings). Our MLS partners do the same, which means that all listing data from those MLSs appears in the SFARMLS system (even if they have fields set to indicate that distribution is disabled).

Not all MLS datashare partners have a Coming Soon (CS) status (MetroList does not) and for those who do, not all of them treat it as an off-market status (BridgeMLS, CCAR and BayEast treat it as a partially on-market status). 

The CS listings in SFARMLS are shared and exchanged with the NORCAL MLS ALLIANCE MLS partners that DO have a compatible status, and those MLSs follow our rules when handling our data. The best example of this concerns day-limits: SFARMLS has no limit on the number of days a listing can be in Coming Soon, so when the listing is shared with BAREIS or BayEast their limits do not apply to our listings. 

REFERENCE TABLES AND FACTS

Article Reference Links

Data Feed License Models (SFARMLS)

Data Handling Rules - Exhibit A (SFARMLS)

Coming Soon & Listing Lifecycle Management (SFARMLS) 

Listing Exemption Certification (webform) (SFARMLS) 

Listing Re-submission Request (webform) (SFARMLS) 

Multiple Listing Options for Sellers (NAR)

Zillow's Listing Access Standards Policy (Zillow)

Listing Statuses 

All SFARMLS valid listing statuses, and On/Off market classification and how the two day counters work.

Top 10 Real Estate Websites

Traffic analysis provided by Semrush; includes notes how they operate as broker members, product vendors, or portals.

Listing Status FAQ

Q: If I have a Coming Soon listing that flips to Active (on-market) is there ANY way to get it to revert back to Coming Soon?

A: There is simply no way to revert a listing back to Coming Soon. The recording of an On-Market Date (OMD) when a listing transitions from pre-market to on-market becomes a critical part of the listing status history and affects DOM and CDOM in ways that are impossible to undo. This means that you should carefully and intentionally monitor your Coming Soon listing's OMD to make sure it does not go on the market unexpectedly. 

What actions are best if it happens accidentally? The best fix is to immediately move the listing to HOLD status, looking at the Listing Status table above that stops DOM (but CDOM will continue). Accumulating CDOM is harmless to a listing - the value is only visible inside the MLS and is not sent to vendors. And the listing won't display on public websites in a hold status because the status is clearly off-market. Bring it back as Active when you're ready. 

Q: Why isn't my listing appearing on <insert portal/site here>?

A: First establish if your listing is not appearing ANYWHERE, or if it is appearing on most sites but not one or two specifically. If your listing is not appearing anywhere, it's likely a setting on your listing, review the section on Distributing Your Listing (above). If the listing is not appearing on one or two specific destinations, you should reach out to the portal directly. 

Here are valuable resources you can use when you contact a portal with questions (all resources listed alphabetically): 

Homes.com - phone support: (800) 431-5509 (or click here for email support)

Realtor.com - phone support: (800) 747-4166 (or click here for email support)

Redfin - phone support: (844) 759-7735 (or click here for email support)

Zillow - phone support: (888) 466‑3501 (or click here to contact their support)

If you have checked your settings carefully, and have tried reaching out to the destination in question where your listing is not appearing correctly, we do want to help - open a ticket with SFARMLS support. 

Q: After August 2025, if I set my listing's ShowToVOW flag to YES, will the listing 'go on' various sites immediately? 

NOTE: THIS ANSWER IS EFFECTIVE AFTER SFARMLS VOW FEEDS ARE MODIFIED IN AUGUST 2025

A: It is critical to identify that there are two parts to this question; the first is asking if listings will be displayed to the public, and the other is about the listing's inclusion in data feeds (when it ISN'T to be displayed to the public). 

Reviewing the section for Distributing Your Listing (above), we can see that a listing that is VOW=Yes is included in VOW and BBO feeds (which are not for marketing, but are intended for application use) but will not be displayed publicly if the listing is Coming Soon (has not hit the on-market data yet). If the listing has hit its OMD (and is now Active) but the PublishToInternet value is set to NO, it will NOT be displayed on public-facing portals and IDX sites (but will continue to be included in VOW and BBO feeds for application use)

To summarize:

- use PublishToInternet to control display on publicly published internet sites used for marketing (where no authentication is required); when set to YES, the listing is eligible for public marketing and advertising, when set to NO, it is not.

- use ShowToVOW to control whether or not the listing is in VOW/BBO application data feeds (noting that VOW/BBO site are REQURIED to establish the Client-Agent relationship and have password protected access to see the data that is set to PublishToInternet=No).