Feeds of Real Estate and Rental Housing Listings

Overview


If you will be sending HotPads a lot of listings, you may want to create an automated feed. (Otherwise, you can create them 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.

Similarly, if you'd like to automate orders of Featured Listings you can create a daily data feed or contact us to discuss other options.

Steps


Here are the recommended steps. Please contact dpeters@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):

  • 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 dpeters@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.


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