Ontario sold data rules

Ontario agents may display sold prices and other off-market MLS data on their own websites, but only inside a VOW: shown to consumers who have registered, accepted terms of use, and hold a valid password. Separately, advertising a specific sold transaction, naming a property or its price in marketing, requires written consent from the parties under RECO’s advertising rules. Most confusion about sold data in Ontario comes from blurring those two lanes. This page keeps them apart. It is general information, not legal advice.

How sold-data display became permitted: the TREB case

The display lane exists because of a decade of competition litigation. The Competition Bureau challenged the Toronto Real Estate Board’s restrictions on members’ use of sold and historical data in 2011. The Competition Tribunal ruled against TREB in 2016, the Federal Court of Appeal upheld that ruling in December 2017, and on August 23, 2018 the Supreme Court of Canada declined to hear TREB’s appeal, leaving the Tribunal’s order in force (Competition Bureau statement, canada.ca, accessed 2026-07-26). The practical outcome: the board was required to stop restricting members from displaying sold prices and historical listing data through VOWs, and sold-data sites became a normal part of the Ontario market.

Two details of that outcome matter for how you operate today. The permission runs through the VOW framework, with its registration and password conditions, not through open publication. And it is why Ontario, unlike most of North America, has consumer-famous sold-price platforms: the ruling made the model viable here first.

What you may display on a VOW

Under TRREB’s VOW terms, a registered, signed-in consumer on your site may see the off-market layer of the MLS: closed sale and lease prices, expired, terminated, suspended and withdrawn listings, and listing history. The default TRREB VOW feed carries roughly the last two years of that history, with deeper archive access available by separate arrangement. Conditions attach to the operator: access only after registration and terms-of-use acceptance, password validity capped at 90 days with renewal permitted, personal and non-commercial use terms, no redistribution, and record-keeping that can stand up to a board audit. The operational walkthrough is on show sold prices in Ontario.

What stays restricted, even on a VOW

The display permission is not a transfer of the database to the public domain:

• No anonymous display. Sold records may not appear to visitors who have not registered and signed in. This includes partial leaks: addresses, photos and detail values of sold records are gated alongside the price itself.
• No redistribution or scraping. The terms your visitors accept bind them to personal, non-commercial use; the terms you accept bind you not to re-syndicate the feed.
• Certain feed fields never display. Some VOW feed content is licensed for internal brokerage use and must stay out of every consumer-facing surface regardless of login state.

Advertising a sold property is a different rule set

RECO Bulletin 5.4 (reco.on.ca, accessed 2026-07-26) governs advertising sold properties, and its core requirement is written consent: marketing must not identify a party to the transaction, a specific property, or the contents of the agreement, including the sale price, without written consent of those affected; including the price engages consent from both sides of the deal. So a “just sold, $1.2M” social post about a specific address is a consent question, while the same sale appearing inside your registered VOW’s sold search is a display question under the board’s VOW terms. Same data point, two different legal lanes, and agents get into trouble by using display logic to justify advertising.

Aggregates: the third lane

Market statistics, average and median prices, sales counts and similar aggregates, are broadly publishable and are how boards themselves market data publicly. The line is identifiability: an aggregate that lets a reader work back to an individual transaction stops being an aggregate. BrokerFold’s posture here is deliberately conservative: on tenant sites, sold-derived statistics are treated as gated content for anonymous visitors, with public pages limited to asking-side figures. We would rather under-display than argue an edge case later.

How BrokerFold implements all of this

Every rule above is enforced in the platform rather than left to each agent’s diligence: server-side redaction of sold records for anonymous visitors, blurred preview derivatives instead of real photos, click-wrap terms capture with timestamps, automatic 90-day password lifecycle, append-only sold-data access logging, and internal-only feed fields that never reach a browser. The full operator’s checklist is on the VOW website page, and the model behind the wall is explained on what is a VOW.