Greater Vancouver REALTORS IDX agreement

Ask for a “Greater Vancouver REALTORS IDX agreement” and you are really asking for two things: authorization for MLS data to flow to your website, and the obligations your site takes on when it renders that data. At GVR — the board formerly known as REBGV — both live under the Rules of Cooperation, the shared rulebook of the three Lower Mainland boards operating one MLS system. We can describe the path first-hand: BrokerFold went through GVR’s vendor application ourselves and built the tri-board integration against the live feed, so what follows is the process as we experienced it, not a summary of someone else’s summary.

The parties, and who signs what

The structure will feel familiar to anyone who has papered a feed in Ontario, with local vocabulary. Board data access always runs through the member’s and brokerage’s own board agreements — your membership, your managing broker’s approval, your brokerage’s standing. The technology company serving your site holds its own vendor authorization with the board and is named in the chain, so the board knows exactly which system touches its data. The division of labour in practice: the board relationship is yours, and the vendor-side application — the technical questionnaire, the feed credentials, the compliance representations — is your platform’s job. A brokerage managing several agent sites repeats the member-level sign-off per site, the same per-site pattern multi-board paperwork follows everywhere in Canada.

What the rules put on your pages

The Rules of Cooperation are prescriptive about display, and the obligations land on every site the paperwork authorizes. The listing brokerage is credited on every thumbnail and detail view. Results pages carry the MLS® Reciprocity logo and the boards’ verbatim disclaimer texts. Page size is capped tighter than most platforms default to. And the rule that catches Ontario-trained eyes: days on market and the listing date stay off public pages entirely — freshness may drive sort orders and “new” badges, but the number itself is for signed-in VOW visitors. Below the record level, individual fields carry their own licensing: room dimensions, flooring, zoning, and the parcel identifier are restricted-tier data even on active listings. The full display build is described on the GVR IDX website page; the takeaway for the paperwork stage is that you are signing up to a rulebook, and your platform should ship it as defaults rather than hand you a memo.

What the display authorization does not cover

Sold prices. BC’s rules keep them off public pages entirely — no grace window — so the “what did it sell for” layer of your site runs under the separate VOW authorization: registered visitors, accepted terms of use, and credentials that expire every 30 days, three times tighter than TRREB’s cycle. Budget the paperwork accordingly: if sold data is part of your plan, and in the Lower Mainland it should be, file the VOW layer alongside the display layer rather than sequencing them. The rules governing that tier are laid out in BC sold data rules, and the product it enables in the GVR VOW website page.

Notes from our own application

Three things we learned building against this feed that a member can’t see from the outside. Licensing is per record: each listing carries tags stating what it may be used for, so display permission is checked row by row, not assumed feed-wide. Licensing is also per field, which means a compliant platform enforces the restricted-field list at the serving query — a public page must be physically unable to include the gated columns. And the three boards’ shared system is genuinely one feed, which is why one integration covers Vancouver through the Fraser Valley to Chilliwack without seams. None of this is member workload — it is exactly the machinery a vendor is supposed to carry — but knowing it exists tells you what to probe when a provider claims BC support.

Getting it moving

Practical order: talk to your managing broker before anything is filed, because their sign-off is the human gate and a warned signer is a fast signer. Confirm your intended platform actually holds GVR vendor status, not merely an intention to apply. Decide the VOW question now so both layers ride one signing effort. Then let the vendor run its half while your site is assembled in parallel. The paperwork is the board’s process on the board’s clock — what you control is arriving at it with every signature pre-arranged.