The External Listing URL field is used to publish a link to a detailed listing page (located on your own website) to Realtor.ca and some of the DDF third party locations if your brokerage has opted into that distribution (such as kijiji).

This is field is an excellent mechanism not just for directing Realtor.ca traffic directly to the listing on your site (increasing lead capture) but it also provides an excellent referral link to your site for the purpose of Search Engine Optimization!

NOTES:
  1. As this field is for an external link to this listing you will need to first make your listing active and provide time for the listing to first appear on your site (time dependent upon you personal website technology being employed and its data refresh rate) - if you manually create listings on your page you theoretically may have already uploaded it and can obtain an active URL to use at the time of activation.
  2. This field can only contain a URL that points directly to a page containing this single listing - pointing to locations other than this (including website home page, a search form, a lead capture form, search results etc.) will result in your listing being rejected by CREA and subsequently excluded from publication on Realtor.ca and any DDF syndication locations.
  3. Below you will find in the steps we specify to use a URL shortener - this is not mandatory but is highly recommended as in testing we discovered that many sites are utilizing dynamically created URL's and that many fail to properly redirect when used in this field. Also some are simply too long. This field is limited by CREA to a maximum of 200 Characters.

Steps to utilize this field:
  1. Visit your website and navigate to the detailed listing page for this listing.
  2. Highlight the entire URL at the top of that page and copy it (ctrl + c) 
  3. Visit a URL shortening site such as bitly.com to obtain a shortened url
  4. In Matrix navigate to the Member Public Remarks tab on the Change Mapping and Comments form for that specific listing.
  5. In the External Listing URL paste the shortened URL and Submit the listing.
Within 1-2 hours the listing link should have migrated to Realtor.ca - I recommend testing this link once it is publicly available in order to confirm that it is pointed to the listings details page on your website.