Every listing on your website started life in your CRM. How it gets from one to the other decides how quickly changes appear, whether photos come across, and what happens when a property is sold. There are three main routes, and most agencies never find out which one they are on.
1. File feeds: BLM and the CRM’s own XML
The oldest route is a file. On a schedule, your CRM writes out every live listing and uploads the file, with its photos, to a server. The website picks it up and imports it.
BLM is the best known of these formats because it is what Rightmove has long accepted. It is a plain text file with a header, a list of fields and one row per property, with photos and floorplans named alongside it. Not every CRM sends BLM to third parties, though. Estates IT sends it by default and Jupix offers it as an option; many others send their own XML format instead, which a website has to be taught to read.
File feeds have one awkward property: a listing is removed by leaving it out. A file that arrives half-uploaded looks exactly like half your stock being withdrawn, so a website that reads file feeds needs to treat absences with suspicion.
2. APIs
An API lets the website ask the CRM directly: what has changed since I last asked? That makes updates faster and cheaper, because only changed listings are fetched, and it removes the need for a file server in the middle. Rex, Street and Reapit work this way, and Alto offers a modern API alongside its older feed.
APIs come with their own conditions. Some are open to any developer with a token the agency creates. Others require the developer to be approved, and some charge the developer for access. Reapit, for example, retired its older third-party feed route in April 2025 in favour of its API platform.
3. CSV exports
Almost every CRM can export a spreadsheet. A CSV import is not a live feed, but it is the universal fallback, and it is how listings are often moved when an agency changes website or CRM.
Questions to ask your CRM supplier
- Do you offer a feed to a third-party website, and in what format?
- Is there a charge for it, to us or to the website developer?
- How often does it update, and can the website ask for changes only?
- How is a withdrawn or sold listing signalled?
- Are photos sent as files, or as links the website must download?
Questions to ask your website supplier
- Which of those routes do you support for our CRM, today?
- What happens when a listing fails to import, and who is told?
- What stops a broken file from taking listings off our site?
- Can we edit a listing on the website without the feed overwriting it?
The answers matter more than the format. A well-run file feed beats a badly-run API, and the difference shows up in whether anyone notices when something goes wrong.
Not sure what your CRM can send?
Tell us on a demo call and we will tell you exactly how your listings would reach a Realist site. Book a demo.