Which listing statuses can I display?

In Ontario, the status question maps onto the two feed lanes. Active listings display publicly under IDX. The off-market side — closed sale and lease records, expired, terminated, suspended, and withdrawn listings, plus history — may render only behind a VOW gate, to registered visitors who accepted terms and hold a valid password. A third category shows nowhere on a consumer site regardless of login. This page is general information rather than legal advice; the current word always belongs to your board’s rules and your brokerage.

The status map

The left column is your storefront; the middle column is your conversion engine; the right column is the part audits look for. The lane definitions themselves are covered in IDX vs VOW.

The public lane: actives, under IDX rules

IDX licenses active inventory for anonymous display, with the board’s attribution and display rules attached. What it never licenses is the past: no closed prices, no history, no failed listings, no matter how the page dresses them. The tempting work-around — showing a sold property “without the price” — fails because the gate covers the record, not the number: photos, details, and the address of an off-market record are restricted alongside the sale price. If a page needs to say anything about solds to anonymous visitors, the compliant shapes are aggregates and gated teasers, per Ontario’s sold data rules.

The gated lane: the off-market layer

Behind registration, the VOW licence opens the layer buyers actually ask about: what closed and for how much, on both the sale and lease sides, plus the listings that didn’t make it — expired, terminated, suspended, withdrawn — and the history connecting relists and price cuts. The distinction between terminated and expired stops being trivia here: those records tell a visitor what a street wouldn’t bear at what ask. The operating conditions ride along: registration first, click-wrap terms recorded, passwords expiring on the board’s schedule, and audit-ready records. The setup walkthrough is in showing sold prices in Ontario.

The nowhere column

Two things never display on a consumer surface, and both are enforcement traps for casually built sites. Seller restrictions: a seller can instruct that their listing stay off the internet, and an internet-display opt-out travels with the record — a compliant site simply never renders it, in any lane. And internal-use content: boards license some feed content for brokerage-internal purposes only, so certain fields and records in your feed must never reach a public or even a signed-in consumer page. Both rules operate per record, on every sync — which is why they must live in the pipeline, not in anyone’s memory.

Keep the map current

Status vocabularies and display classifications are board rules, and board rules get revised — treat the map above as the shape of the Ontario regime as of mid-2026, not a permanent artifact. In-between statuses, conditional sales especially, are the moving edge. Two habits keep you safe: confirm the current classification with your board or brokerage when a status question actually matters, and run a platform that applies status gating automatically at the data layer, so a rule change updates your site without a human remembering to. On our stack that gating is pipeline law rather than page-by-page discipline, which is the only way it stays true at listing volume.