What is a VOW agreement (Ontario)

A VOW agreement is the contract that licenses Virtual Office Website data — sold and leased prices, off-market records, and listing history — for display on one named website, behind visitor registration. In Ontario’s TRREB market it is signed online through the board’s data-agreements flow, needs your technology vendor’s authorization and your broker of record’s approval, and binds the site operator to the VOW rules: an account and accepted terms of use before gated data appears, passwords that expire, no redistribution, and a registered URL the board can audit.

What the agreement actually licenses

The VOW lane is the deep end of the board’s data. Where the IDX agreement covers public display of active listings, the VOW agreement unlocks the layer consumers ask about most: what properties sold and leased for, plus expired, terminated, suspended and withdrawn records and the history behind them. The lane also carries a richer field set, so even active listings show more to a signed-in visitor than the public slice allows. What that looks like on a working GTA site — the locked cards, the registration wall, the research experience behind it — is the subject of the TRREB VOW website page.

The obligations that ride along

The licence is conditional, and the conditions are the point — they are what makes displaying this data lawful at all. A visitor must create an account and actively accept terms of use before any gated record renders. Passwords have a fixed validity — 90 days on TRREB — so access is periodically re-confirmed under current terms. The data may serve the visitor’s own real-estate purposes only, and the operator must prevent bulk extraction and republication. The board registers the exact site address the agreement covers and audits against it. None of this is optional or negotiable per member; the full checklist, and how a compliant platform automates it, is in VOW compliance requirements.

The three signatures, and their order

The signing set mirrors the IDX agreement’s: the member, the technology vendor, and the broker of record — the last because MLS data is licensed to brokerages in Ontario, so no member site operates on a member’s signature alone. The member initiates online and fills the schedule identifying the vendor and the website address (the part explained in the Schedule B answer), the vendor confirms, the broker approves, the board processes. The broker approval is routinely the slowest link, and the fix is social rather than procedural — the broker-side approvals guide covers that half of the story.

How it fits beside the IDX agreement

They are separate contracts that want to be signed together. IDX powers the public, search-engine-visible side of your site; the VOW agreement powers the registered layer where sold data lives. Because both collect the same three signatures in the same flow, filing them in one sitting costs minutes, while deciding you want sold data a month after your IDX approval restarts the whole signature loop. Agents planning any market-research experience for visitors — sold searches, price history, sold prices on your own domain — should treat the pair as one filing.

What it means for your website in practice

The agreement makes the site operator responsible for mechanics no agent should hand-build: registration gates on every sold surface, terms-of-use capture, password expiry and renewal, and keeping the gated layer sealed against anonymous traffic. This is platform work. BrokerFold runs TRREB VOW sites in production and enforces the gate, the expiry windows, and the audit trail automatically, so the agreement’s obligations are absorbed by infrastructure rather than willpower. Your part of the bargain stays small and human: sign it, get it approved, and let the paperwork’s conditions run as code.