BC sold data rules

In British Columbia, sold prices and off-market MLS data may appear on a member’s website only inside a VOW — a Virtual Office Website, where every visitor has registered, accepted terms of use, and holds a password the rules force to expire monthly. There is no public lane. No sold archive open to anonymous visitors, no “recently sold” strip on a homepage, no public estimate widget quietly built on sold records. Most of what confuses agents about sold data here comes from importing assumptions from Ontario, where the wall works differently. This page is the tri-board rulebook in plain language, reviewed against the March 17, 2025 edition of the Rules of Cooperation. It is general information, not legal advice.

One rulebook, three boards

The rules come from a single document shared by Greater Vancouver REALTORS® (GVR, formerly the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver), the Fraser Valley Real Estate Board and the Chilliwack & District Real Estate Board, which together operate one MLS system across the Lower Mainland and out to Chilliwack. Because the rulebook is shared, the sold-data rules do not change when a listing sits in Surrey instead of Kitsilano — one set of obligations covers the whole tri-board territory. Other BC boards, on Vancouver Island and in the Interior and North, run their own systems and their own paperwork; this page covers the tri-board rules specifically.

Two lanes: public display and the VOW

The rulebook defines two display regimes and never lets them blur. The public lane — the MLS Reciprocity program — covers active, internet-approved listings only, with prescribed attribution and disclaimers. The registered lane is the VOW, and it is where everything off-market lives: closed sales and their prices, expired, terminated and withdrawn listings, and the richer field set the feed licenses to signed-in visitors only. The lane assignment travels with the data itself. Every record in the feed carries licence tags saying which lane it may serve in, and — a detail almost nobody outside compliance work expects — some records are VOW-restricted even while active. A correct implementation checks the record’s licence, not just its status.

What a VOW may display, and to whom

To a registered visitor in good standing, a VOW may show the off-market layer: sold and leased records with prices, expired and withdrawn listings, and fields the public lane never carries — room dimensions, flooring, zoning, the parcel identifier. Days on market, which stays off public pages entirely (public sites may use freshness only for sort orders and “new” badges), may be shown to a signed-in registrant. And the derivative rule is the one that catches technologists: statistics, valuations and automated estimates derived from VOW data inherit its gating. Sold-fed analytics are registered-visitor content, full stop.

What never displays, even behind the login

The VOW is a licence, not a transfer of the database. Some content is prohibited from consumer display in any lane, signed in or not: sellers’ and occupants’ names and contact information, REALTOR®-only remarks, showing and security instructions, and the seller’s mortgage and personal details. A well-built platform keeps these fields out of every client payload at the server, so no template, plugin or bug can render them. Separately, sellers may opt their listing or address out of internet display altogether, and an opted-out record must not appear — BrokerFold’s posture is to refuse such records at ingest, which is stronger than filtering them later.

The registrant lifecycle: BC’s 30-day rule

The conditions on the visitor account are unusually specific, and they are the operational heart of the rules. Registration requires a name and valid email; the terms of use must be displayed and accepted by an affirmative click, and must include an acknowledgment of BCREA’s privacy notice; a confirmation email follows, and the visitor acknowledges receiving it. The password — and VOW access with it — expires within 30 days, and automatic renewal is not permitted: on expiry, a new password and a fresh click-confirmed email are required before access resumes. Registrant records must be kept for the password’s validity plus 180 days, an activity audit trail must be producible to the board, data must be refreshed at least daily with a visible last-updated date, and a single inquiry may return at most 100 listings. None of this is optional, and none of it is reasonable to run by hand — which is the practical argument for a platform that treats the lifecycle as machinery. Ontario agents will notice the contrast immediately: Ontario’s rules allow 90-day passwords, so a site serving both provinces must key its expiry clock to the board, per listing, not to a setting.

Where BC Assessment fits

Consumers often believe sold prices are “already public” in BC because BC Assessment values are, and because transfers register in the land title system. Both are real public records; neither is the MLS sold record. An assessed value is a valuation as of a fixed date, routinely far from what a property actually fetched, and land-title data carries none of the listing’s photos, details or market history. The dataset consumers actually want — what it listed for, what it sold for, how long it took, what it looked like — is licensed board data, and the VOW is the only place a member’s website may show it.

What this means for your website

The rules read as a burden and function as a moat. Because BC has no public sold lane, a registration wall here has genuine pull: the consumer cannot get the MLS sold record without signing in somewhere, and a well-run VOW makes that somewhere your domain. BrokerFold enforces everything above in the platform — query-level gating, ingest-level opt-out refusal, field-level licensing, the 30-day lifecycle with code-verified renewal, append-only access logs — so compliance is the default state rather than your weekend project. The walkthrough of what visitors actually experience is on show sold prices in BC, and the board-specific product page is GVR VOW website.