VOW
The BrokerFold Team — Product + Engineering
Last reviewed
A VOW is a real estate website that shows registered, signed-in visitors what the public feed cannot: sold and leased prices, expired and terminated listings, and the history behind a property. The visitor creates an account, accepts terms of use, and holds a password; in exchange, the site may serve them data at nearly the depth a client would get from their agent directly. The acronym stands for Virtual Office Website — the term itself has a history worth its own entry.
How a VOW works in Canada
Every board licenses its VOW feed separately, with conditions attached. TRREB requires click-wrap terms acceptance and passwords that lapse after 90 days. The Greater Vancouver tri-board system runs a 30-day cycle and goes further: certain fields — room dimensions, flooring, zoning, the PID — are licensed for signed-in visitors only, so a compliant platform has to gate individual fields, not just whole pages. Access is auditable, and the data may only be used for the visitor’s own real estate purposes. None of this is optional, which is why the compliance layer belongs in the platform rather than in an agent’s to-do list; BrokerFold enforces the expiry, gating, and audit trail automatically on every site it serves.
What a VOW does for an agent’s site
The commercial logic is simple: sold prices are the single question consumers most want answered, and a VOW is the only compliant way to answer it on your own domain. Anonymous visitors hit a locked, blurred preview; the account they create to get past it is a named lead with search behaviour attached. The full product picture — what registration looks like, what converts — is on the VOW website page.
Common confusions
A VOW is not a fancier IDX. IDX is public display of active listings; the VOW lane carries the off-market universe and often more fields even on actives — the split is walked through in IDX vs VOW. A registration wall alone is not a VOW either: gating your newsletter licenses nothing. And sold data itself is a separate concept — the VOW is the licence and the doorway, not the data.
Frequently asked questions
Why do VOW passwords expire?
Board rules require it. TRREB sets validity at 90 days; the Greater Vancouver tri-board rulebook uses 30. Expiry forces a periodic renewal under current terms, and a good platform handles the warning emails and self-serve renewal automatically so visitors barely notice.
Is a VOW legal in Canada?
Yes. The question was settled in Ontario in 2018 after a long competition-law fight over Toronto sold data, and boards across the country now license VOW feeds under their own conditions. What stays illegal is publishing that data openly, outside the registered relationship.
Keep reading
- VOW website A VOW website shows registered visitors the sold prices and off-market history anonymous sites can't display. How VOWs work, and how BrokerFold runs one.
- IDX vs VOW IDX shows active listings to everyone; VOW adds sold and off-market data behind free registration. Most Ontario agents should run both. Where DDF fits.
- Virtual Office Website Virtual Office Website is the formal term behind the VOW acronym: a site serving registered visitors like brokerage clients. The history and the meaning.
- Sold data Sold data is the record of what properties actually sold for. Where it lives in Canada, who may display it, and how a VOW puts it on your website.