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. 

Private/Exclusive marketing period - during this period, there is a listing agreement and some other forms as required in California. One of the forms attached to a listing agreement (the MLSA + SELI combo form) demonstrates that sellers are aware of the MLS and want to delay or waive being on the open market. Listings that are being withheld from submission while being marketing exclusive inside the listing office cannot be publicly marketed using a One-To-Many (1:many) mechanism. An agent working at a brokerage may choose to email an internal office exclusive listing in a One-To-One (1:1) type of scenario. They might send a link via SMS/text message, again an example of a 1:1 communication. 

When a listing being held as an Office Exclusive is blasted out to many recipients, or if it's surfaced publicly with signage or activities such as showings that are visible to non-office Agents, it means the 'exclusivity' period has ended. It does not matter who was responsible for the disclosure of the listing's existence, it is now public and as a member of SFARMLS the Agent is now required to submit the listing.

Coming Soon is the answer here - the listing is submitted, but no DOM accumulation begins and it is not eligible to be displayed publicly on "IDX" (or other marketing) type sites.

In SFARMLS our Agents have the option of creating a listing that is Coming Soon (does NOT appear on-market) but is considered to be fully submitted to the MLS and is visible to other MLS participants and subscribers. Read on for details regarding Coming Soon, and then consult the table at the end of this article for all of the SFARMLS statuses, whether or not they are on-market or off-market and also if the statuses track DOM and/or CDOM.

Coming Soon

As stated above, Coming Soon listings are still part of the phase before you are on-market. This means that they are in the MLS, but are not part of the normal channels for public marketing. They will be distributed in certain specific types of data feeds for application use (once we complete changes in August 2025).

Starting in August of 2025, SFAR member's Coming Soon listings ARE included in Virtual Office Website feeds and all configurations of Broker Back-Office Feeds. They are never to be included in Internet Data eXchange feeds. You can read more about feed licensing types here. While the Coming Soon data IS included in VOW and BBO feeds, they carry with them very specific data handling rules that all recipients must adhere to in order to continue to receive their data.

Because a valid Coming Soon listing is fully submitted to SFARMLS, you are guaranteed that your seller's listing will appear on public listing search and display portals without exception, as long as PublishToInternet is YES and the current date is greater than or equal to the On-Market Date (OMD).

When You Go To Market 

The magic date everyone cares about on a listing is the On-Market Date (OMD). It originates in the Listing Agreement and is repeated and/or updated on various addendums and exhibits that may or may not be included with the Listing Agreement. The OMD in the MLS must match your contracts and documents. In SFARMLS the value "List Date" reflects the date that the listing agreement is signed, but not when it will public marketing will start. 

An on-market Active listing is visible inside the MLS to all Participants and Subscribers and is displayed publicly as long as you've set it to be visible using the Publish To Internet = YES setting and assuming the current date is greater than or equal to the OMD. 

Once a listing has been marked Active, it can only be changed to:  CONTINGENT (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), or CANCELED (either automatically on the listing's entered Canceled Date, or by the Agent affirmatively by taking action to set that status). 

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).

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:

   PublishToInternet (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. 

   ShowToVOW (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 locked to NO. 

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). Once all contingencies have been cleared or removed and 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. However, 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.

Reciprocal MLS Considerations

Not all MLSs 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. 

The deep reciprocal datashare MLS partners receive listings even if they are set to NO in the flags for PublishToInternet or ShowToVow (see the block 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).

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)

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: (or click here for email 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.