Overview

If you will be sending HotPads a lot of listings, you may want to create an automated feed. (Otherwise, you can create listings one at a time) There are many ways of doing this, but the most common is for you to run through your listing database every night and save all the listings in a big xml file on your web server. Our servers will download that file at a time when it's guaranteed to be finished.

Steps

Here are the recommended steps. Please contact feeds@hotpads.com if you have special requirements.

• Take a look at the sample HotPads XML document that applies to you (if you have a different format already set up, let us know):
  
  
  • Note: For-sale listing feeds should instead be submitted to Zillow using Zillow's feed instructions. Rental feeds should be submitted to HotPads using the below formats.
  
  
  • Houses, condo units, land etc. (one floor plan per listing)
  
  
  • Apartment communities, new housing developments, new condo buildings, etc. (multiple floor plans per listing)
  
  
  • Featured Listing Orders


• Create a cron job that iterates through each listing in your database and writes out the XML to one big file.


• Send the URL of the file and the time we should process it to feeds@hotpads.com


• If you'd like to send it over HTTPS or protect it with a username/password, make note of that in the email (generally not necessary since we will be publishing the data in the file)


• Tell us if you'd like a report emailed to you each time the feed runs

Please note

• Do not include HTML in your feed.
• the XML tags are case-sensitive
• listings with required fields missing will not appear
• the following are reserved characters in XML, so they need to be escaped
• quote (")
• apostrophe (')
• ampersand (&)
• less than (<)
• greater than (>)
• Be sure to include all information a housing shopper needs, common omissions include:
• original contact information
• full location information
• all available photos
• Please let us know if you wish to opt out of any of our distribution partners.
• Feeds from aggregators, professional publications or feeds that contain foreclosure listings must participate in one of our premium listing programs. Please contact us for more details.