A Real Estate Listings Site That Keeps Up With an MLS Feed Refreshing Every Five Minutes

The client is a residential real estate brokerage that needed a public-facing website built to generate leads, not just list properties. Their agents were losing prospects to slower, harder-to-search listing pages, and the brokerage had no reliable way to connect its site to live MLS inventory without the two systems drifting out of sync.

Client

A residential real estate brokerage

Duration

Ongoing engagement

Industry

Real Estate

Country

Not specified in source material — confirm before publishing

Tech Stack

WordPress

Services

Website Development

How do you keep a website in sync with an MLS feed that updates every five minutes?

We built a dedicated integration layer that fetches, stores, updates and deletes listing records on the same cadence the MLS feed publishes on, rather than relying on periodic full re-imports. Only the records that actually changed get processed, which keeps the sync fast. The website reads from a locally optimized dataset instead of querying the MLS API directly on every page load, so visitors get current listings without the site waiting on an external feed to respond. This approach keeps data freshness and page speed from working against each other.

Can a WordPress website handle a large, constantly-updating MLS database without slowing down?

Yes, but it depends on how the integration is built, not on WordPress alone. We optimized the underlying queries specifically for the filter combinations buyers actually use, neighborhood, county, zip code and property type, instead of relying on default database calls against the full dataset. Combined with a sync process that updates only changed records, the site stays fast even as the MLS database grows. The platform choice matters less than the engineering underneath the search and sync layers.

What should a real estate brokerage look for before starting an MLS integration project?

Start with how often the MLS feed actually updates and confirm the API's rate limits and data structure before any design work begins. Decide upfront which fields buyers need to see first on a listing page, since that shapes the whole layout. Also plan for the full data lifecycle, not just adding new listings, because sold or withdrawn properties need to be removed just as reliably as new ones are added. Skipping this discovery step is where most MLS integration projects run into rework later.

How long does it take to build a real estate website with a live MLS integration?

Timelines vary with the complexity of the filtering and the MLS provider's API, but a project like this typically moves through wireframing, high-fidelity design, API integration and testing as sequential, overlapping phases rather than one long build. Getting the wireframe approved early keeps the design and development phases moving in parallel instead of blocking on each other. We provide a phase-based timeline during discovery once the MLS provider and required filters are confirmed.

Why did this project need custom API integration instead of an existing MLS plugin?

Off-the-shelf MLS plugins are usually built for generic use cases and don't give enough control over sync frequency, query performance or how data changes are handled. Because this MLS feed refreshed every five minutes and the client's top priority was speed, we needed a custom integration where the fetch, store, update and delete logic could be tuned specifically for that cadence and for the filtering the client's buyers actually used. A generic plugin would have meant compromising on one or the other.