GVR VOW website

A GVR VOW website serves the sold and off-market layer of Greater Vancouver’s shared MLS — closed sales with their prices, plus expired, terminated and withdrawn listings — to visitors who register on your site, accept terms of use, and sign in. It is the board-specific version of the general VOW model, built on the feed operated by Greater Vancouver REALTORS® (GVR, the board known until 2024 as the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver) together with the Fraser Valley Real Estate Board and the Chilliwack & District Real Estate Board. In a province where the rulebook offers no public lane for sold data at all, the VOW is not a feature on a listings site. It is the reason a consumer has to register with you instead of a portal.

One MLS, three boards

The Lower Mainland does not run three separate systems. GVR, Fraser Valley and Chilliwack & District share one MLS and one rulebook — the Rules of Cooperation — so a VOW on this feed reaches from Vancouver proper and the North Shore through Surrey and Langley out to Chilliwack, behind a single registration wall. That footprint matters in practice: Lower Mainland clients cross board boundaries every time they compare a Burnaby townhouse against one in Langley, and a sold archive that stopped at a boundary would fail the exact conversation it exists to serve.

What the VOW lane contains

More than sold prices. The distinctive thing about this feed is that licensing runs per record and per field. Every record carries its own licence tags declaring whether it may display publicly or only behind the VOW login — and some listings are VOW-restricted even while active, which means a compliant site must gate them in full despite their status. Fields work the same way: room dimensions, flooring, zoning and the parcel identifier are licensed for signed-in visitors only, so the public and signed-in views of the same listing are legitimately different documents. Days on market follows suit — the rulebook keeps it off public pages entirely, while a registered visitor may see it. The plain-language version of all of this is on BC sold data rules; the short version is that the wall in BC is thicker than most agents expect, and that is precisely what makes crossing it worth a registration.

The 30-day wall

BC runs the strictest registrant lifecycle of Canada’s major markets. A VOW password — and the access it grants — expires within 30 days, no automatic renewal permitted. The sequence the rulebook prescribes is specific: name and valid email, terms of use displayed and accepted by an affirmative click (BCREA’s privacy notice acknowledged in the same step), then a confirmation email whose receipt the visitor acknowledges, and on every expiry a fresh password confirmed the same way before access resumes. Ontario, for contrast, allows 90 days. A platform serving both provinces has to key the expiry clock off the board a listing belongs to, never off one global setting — which is how BrokerFold’s access gate is built. Expiry warnings go out ahead of the deadline, renewal is a code-verified self-serve step, and a lapsed password re-locks sold data without touching the account or its saved searches.

How BrokerFold serves the lane

The enforcement lives in the platform, not in a checklist you follow:

• Gating at the serving query. Sold and VOW-restricted records are withheld server-side from anonymous sessions; there is no client-side hiding to inspect around.
• Blurred previews, not leaks. Anonymous visitors who touch sold territory meet a locked card with a purpose-generated blur derivative — enough to prompt a registration, never enough to be the data.
• Field rules from the feed itself. The board publishes machine-readable licensing for every field, and the platform enforces it in every payload, so a VOW-only field cannot reach a public page by template accident.
• Records that survive an audit. Click-wrap acceptance is timestamped, access is logged append-only, and registrant records are retained past password validity on the board’s schedule.

Where we stand with GVR, honestly

BrokerFold’s data plane speaks this tri-board feed natively today — the per-record and per-field licence handling, the disclaimer set, and the 30-day lifecycle are built into the platform, not promised on a roadmap. Board data access always runs through your own membership and your brokerage’s agreements; our job is the technical vendor side and everything downstream of it. If you want to see what the registered experience looks like end to end before starting paperwork, showing sold prices in BC walks it visitor-first, and every template runs the same VOW machinery regardless of design.