Compliance: run a compliant VOW day to day
The BrokerFold Team — Product + Engineering
Last reviewed
On this page
A VOW licence is the best data deal in Canadian real estate — sold and off-market records on your own site — and it stays yours by being operated correctly every day, not just configured correctly once. The full requirement list belongs to VOW compliance requirements; this lesson is the smaller set of things that remain your problem after a competent vendor has taken the rest.
Understand which duties never left you
Your platform should own the machinery: registration before access, recorded terms acceptance, password expiry, server-side redaction, blurred previews for locked records, access logging. What no platform can own is your behaviour with the data — where you republish it, what you promise visitors, and whether you notice if the gate ever weakens. Day-to-day VOW compliance is mostly self-discipline plus verification.
Run the anonymous test monthly
Open a private browser window, go to your site signed out, and pull up a sold listing. You should meet a registration wall: no sold price, and only the deliberately blurred preview image — the treatment explained in why sold listing photos are blurred. Then view the page source and search for the price. If it appears anywhere in the anonymous response, even hidden by styling, the gate is broken and that is a same-day vendor escalation. Five minutes, once a month, and you have personally verified the load-bearing requirement.
Respect the password clock instead of resenting it
Expiring passwords are a term of the agreement — 90 days on TRREB, shorter on some boards — and the platform handles warnings, re-locks, and renewal for you. Your only jobs are to leave the mechanism alone and to frame it well: visitors renew happily when your site treats renewal as routine account hygiene. The reasoning behind the clock is worth one read at why VOW passwords expire, if only so you can answer the question when a client asks it.
Keep gated data inside the gate
The recurring operator failure is not technical — it is a screenshot. A sold record from your own VOW, pasted into an email blast or a just-sold graphic, has left the display lane and become advertising, where a different rulebook applies; the boundary between the two lanes is the subject of the sold-data lesson. The habit to build: data behind the gate is consulted there and discussed with clients there, never exported.
Know what your records would show
The agreement makes you accountable for who accessed gated data, so acceptance timestamps and an untampered access log must exist — the platform writes both automatically, append-only. Never ask a vendor to edit history for any reason; a clean log you can produce on request is the whole point, and where those records sit among your other obligations is covered in record keeping that saves you.
What done looks like
The anonymous test passes every month. Renewal emails go out and visitors come back. Nothing gated has ever appeared in your marketing, and if the board audited tomorrow, your answer would be a report, not a scramble.
The mistake that costs the most
Quietly weakening the gate to reduce friction — showing a little more to anonymous visitors because registration “costs leads.” It has the economics backwards: the gate is why serious buyers register, which makes it your best capture mechanism precisely when it is enforced honestly. Soften it and you trade your licence’s future for a metric that was working for you all along.
Frequently asked questions
A past client asked me to text them the sold price of a neighbour's house — can I?
Sharing sold information inside a client relationship is ordinary practice, but understand what the VOW does and does not give you: it is a display permission on your registered website for signed-in visitors, not a general right to republish sold data in marketing. A price in a mass email or a social post is the marketing lane, and that lane runs on written consent.
Why do my visitors keep getting password-renewal emails?
Because the board requires it. On TRREB the VOW password is valid for at most 90 days and some boards run shorter clocks, so the platform warns visitors before expiry and re-locks sold data until they renew. It feels like friction; it is actually the visible proof your site honours the agreement.
Keep reading
- Compliance: sold data on your website Two lanes, never blurred: display sold prices to registered VOW visitors on your site, and advertise a specific sale only with written consent.
- Compliance: record keeping that saves you The six files that end compliance disputes before they start: consents, licences, substantiation, acceptance logs — and which ones write themselves.
- VOW compliance requirements The operating conditions attached to a TRREB VOW: registration, click-wrap terms, 90-day passwords, server-side gating, audit records. A vendor checklist.
- Why do VOW passwords expire VOW rules cap password validity — 90 days on TRREB, 30 on Vancouver's tri-board MLS — so sold-data access stays tied to a live broker–consumer relationship.
- Why are sold listing photos blurred? Sold records sit behind VOW display rules, so compliant sites serve a blurred placeholder until you sign in. We build that blur — here's the machinery.