What is a VOW

A VOW, or Virtual Office Website, is a password-protected real estate website that may display MLS data a public site cannot: sold and leased prices, expired and terminated listings, and property history. A consumer registers, accepts the site’s terms of use, and thereby enters a broker-consumer relationship; that relationship is what makes the expanded data display permissible. Registration walls and expiring passwords are not growth hacks. They are the operating conditions attached to the VOW data feed.

The definition, unpacked

A VOW is defined by three things working together. First, an expanded data feed from the MLS: on TRREB, the VOW feed includes sold records and off-market statuses that never appear in the public IDX feed. Second, an access wall: the consumer must create an account, click through terms of use, and keep a valid password. Third, operator obligations: the site must enforce the wall on the server, keep records, and follow the board’s display rules for what registered visitors see.

Any site that shows you a sold price after making you sign in is running this model, whether it belongs to a national portal or an individual agent. The mechanism is identical; the difference is whose brand and whose lead pipeline sits on top of it.

What a VOW shows that public sites cannot

Signed-in visitors on a VOW can see the layer of the market that public sites must omit: what homes actually sold or leased for, when listings were terminated or expired and relisted, and how a property’s asking price moved across previous cycles. Public IDX sites show active listings only. The delta between those two views is precisely the information people want when they are seriously pricing a purchase or a sale, which is why VOW-model sites dominate consumer attention in Ontario.

Why registration and expiring passwords exist

The wall exists because sold data is licensed for service, not for publication. The framework treats a registered VOW user like a client being served through a virtual office rather than a member of the public reading an advertisement. Concretely, that means:

• Registration before access. The site must know who is looking at sold data. Anonymous access to it is not permitted.
• Terms of use acceptance. The click-wrap records the visitor’s agreement to personal, non-commercial use with no redistribution.
• Password expiry. Validity is capped (90 days under TRREB VOW terms) so access stays tied to a live relationship instead of becoming a permanent public database. Renewal is allowed, and a well-built site makes it painless.

BrokerFold implements each of these natively, with the acceptance timestamps and access logs retained. The operator-side checklist lives on the VOW website page.

How HouseSigma made the VOW model famous

HouseSigma, the platform most Ontario consumers associate with sold prices, is a registered VOW partner of TRREB. It shows sold data only to signed-in users, withholds addresses and prices from anonymous visitors, screens for bona fide consumers, and restricts agent and commercial accounts from VOW content (per its published terms and FAQ, accessed July 2026). In other words, the best-known sold-data site in the province is an implementation of exactly this model, operating under the same class of rules any agent’s VOW does.

The strategic point for agents: HouseSigma proved that consumers will gladly trade registration for sold data at enormous scale. The HouseSigma-style website page covers what that model looks like when the registrations are yours.

A VOW on your own website

Running a VOW used to be something only portals and large teams could operationalize, because the compliance machinery is genuinely fiddly: server-side gating, blurred previews, password lifecycles, audit logs. That is now platform work. A BrokerFold site is an IDX site and a VOW on one domain: active listings public, sold data behind a free visitor account, every registration delivered to your CRM. If you are deciding whether you actually need the VOW layer, start with IDX vs VOW; if you want to see how sold display works in Ontario specifically, read show sold prices in Ontario.