VOW website
The BrokerFold Team — Product + Engineering
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A VOW website, short for Virtual Office Website, is a real estate website where visitors create a free account and, once signed in, can see MLS data that public sites are not allowed to show: sold prices, leased records, and off-market history. In Ontario it is the mechanism the boards provide for displaying individual MLS sold records on your own domain without per-transaction consent. BrokerFold builds and operates VOW websites for agents on TRREB data, with the registration, password, and data-gating machinery handled by the platform.
What a VOW website can show that an IDX site cannot
The short version: an IDX site shows active listings to everyone; a VOW shows the rest of the database to registered visitors. Sold and leased prices, expired, terminated, suspended and withdrawn listings, and the history behind a property’s current cycle are all VOW-class data. On TRREB the VOW feed also simply carries more records and more fields than the IDX feed, so even day-to-day browsing is deeper for a signed-in visitor.
| Surface | IDX (public) | VOW (registered) |
|---|---|---|
| Active listings | Yes | Yes, with additional fields |
| Sold and leased prices | No | Yes |
| Expired / terminated / withdrawn | No | Yes |
| Historical listing cycles | No | Yes |
| Visitor login required | No | Yes, with terms acceptance |
This is the data buyers and sellers actually want. Anyone can find an asking price. The question that decides offers is what comparable homes actually closed at, and that answer lives behind the VOW wall.
How registration works for your visitors
A visitor hits a sold listing, sees a locked preview, and is asked to create a free account. Creating one means accepting your site’s terms of use through an explicit click-wrap step, which establishes the broker-consumer relationship the data licence requires. From then on they browse sold data signed in, on your domain, under your brand.
Two mechanics matter and BrokerFold implements both:
- Accounts are per-site. A visitor account on your website belongs to your website. It is not a shared pool across other agents’ sites.
- Passwords expire on a schedule. TRREB VOW terms cap password validity at 90 days. BrokerFold tracks the clock per visitor, warns them by email 7 days and 1 day before expiry, and offers a code-verified renewal that restores access in under a minute. Expiry re-locks sold data only; nothing about the account is deleted.
What has to happen behind the scenes
The compliance work is invisible when it is done properly, and it is the part most website vendors get wrong. On a BrokerFold VOW:
- Gating happens on the server. An anonymous request for a sold listing gets a response with the address, price, photos and details already removed. There is no real value hidden under CSS blur for a clever visitor to uncover in the page source.
- Locked cards show a purpose-built preview image. Anonymous visitors see a tiny, server-blurred derivative generated in our image pipeline, never the real photo scaled down or blurred in the browser.
- Every granted sold-data view is logged. An append-only access log records which registered visitor viewed which sold record and when, which is the record-keeping posture a board audit expects.
- Attribution survives the lock. The listing brokerage credit stays visible even on gated cards, because display rules require it either way.
When you evaluate any VOW provider, ask how they do these four things. “We blur it” is not an answer; where the blur happens is the answer.
Why a VOW is the strongest lead engine in real estate
Sold-data search is why consumers in Ontario keep returning to HouseSigma-style portals after every showing. A VOW puts that exact pull on your own domain: the visitor who registers to see what a house closed at is handing you their name, their email, and a live signal about the neighbourhood and price band they care about. That is a lead with context, not a cold form fill.
On BrokerFold, every VOW registration lands in the built-in CRM, with the visitor’s on-site behaviour attached: listings viewed, searches saved, favourites hearted. Follow-up starts from what they actually looked at. The full mechanics are on the VOW registration as a lead engine page.
What BrokerFold’s VOW includes
Every BrokerFold plan that includes MLS data includes the VOW machinery. There is no compliance add-on tier:
- Sold browse mode across grid, map and search, gated server-side
- Sold history and price timelines on listing detail pages
- Recently-sold-nearby modules on active listings
- Free visitor accounts with click-wrap terms capture and audit trail
- Automatic password-expiry warnings and self-serve renewal
- Saved searches and listing alerts for registered visitors
- Registrations flowing straight into the CRM with behavioural context
Templates inherit all of it. Whichever design you pick from the template gallery, the sold-data experience and its gating behave identically underneath.
How to get a VOW website live
You do not need to build anything or negotiate for a feed yourself. The path with BrokerFold: pick a template, sign the TRREB/PropTx VOW data agreement online (we prepare it as your technology provider), your broker of record approves it, and the board processes it. Paperwork, not technology, is the critical path; most of the elapsed time is human approval steps. Once processed, sold data on your domain switches on. See plans and pricing for what the platform costs, and start from the IDX vs VOW decision guide if you are still weighing which feeds you need.
Frequently asked questions
Do visitors have to create an account to see sold prices?
Yes. Sold and off-market data may only be shown to visitors who have registered on your site, accepted its terms of use, and hold a valid password. That is the condition attached to the VOW data feed, and it is enforced on the server, not just in the interface.
Can one website be both an IDX site and a VOW?
Yes, and that is the normal setup. Active listings stay public for search engines and casual browsers, while sold data sits behind the free registration wall. BrokerFold sites run both feeds on one domain.
Does the registration wall scare visitors away?
Some anonymous visitors bounce, but the ones who register are disproportionately serious. Sold data is the one thing they cannot get without an account anywhere, which is why VOW registration converts better than a generic newsletter form.
Keep reading
- 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.
- What is a VOW A VOW (Virtual Office Website) is a password-protected real estate site that can show sold prices and off-market MLS data to registered consumers.
- VOW registration lead capture VOW registration converts because it trades real value, sold data, for identity. How the gate works as lead capture and what a registration tells you.
- Plans & pricing Published prices in Canadian dollars — from $89/month, $0 setup.