Privacy & data protection policy

About this Notice

Homesearch Digital Limited (“Homesearch”, “we” or “us”) take the privacy of your information very seriously. This Privacy Notice is designed to tell you about our practices regarding the collection, use and disclosure of personal information which may be collected in person from you, obtained via our websites or collected through other means such as by an online form, email, or telephone communication.

This notice applies to personal information provided by our contacts, users and customers whose data we process. In this notice “you” refers to any individual whose personal data we hold or process. This notice is governed by the EU General Data Protection Regulation (the “GDPR”).

Personal data we collect and how we process this data

Below we have set out the categories of data we collect, the legal basis we rely on to process the data and how we process the data:

Contact information for our users, customers and potential customers such as names, email addresses, phone numbers, addresses (“Contact Information”). We process this information when we communicate with you or provide services to you on the basis of the performance of our contract with you and on the basis of our legitimate interest in providing our services to our customers.
Enquiry Data includes information provided to us when you wish to make an enquiry of an agent in relation to a property listed with our property listing service, this may include contact information and the details of the property you are enquiring about. We process this information when we manage or provide services to you on the basis of the performance of our contract with you and on the basis of our legitimate interest in providing our services to our users.
Usage Data includes information we may hold about you in relation to your use of the property listing and enquiry service, this may include details of the properties you have viewed, how many properties you have viewed, when and how frequently you have viewed properties or logged in and other information relating to your use of the service. We process this information when we monitor our relationship with you and provide services to you on the basis of the performance of our contract with you and on the basis of our legitimate interest in providing our services to our customers and users.
Transaction Data includes details about payments to and from you and other details of Services you or your employer has purchased from us. We process this information when we manage or provide services to you on the basis of the performance of our contract with you and on the basis of our legitimate interest in providing our services to our customers and users.
Communications Data includes a record of any correspondence or communication between you and us. We process this information when we monitor our relationship with you and provide services to you on the basis of the performance of our contract with you and on the basis of our legitimate interest in providing our services to our customers and users.
Technical Data includes internet protocol (IP) address, your login data, browser type and version, time zone setting and location, browser plug- in types and versions, operating system and platform, and other technology on the devices you use to access the Homesearch Website. We process this information to optimise and monitor our technology on the basis of the performance of our contract with you and on the basis of our legitimate interest in providing and improving our services to our customers and users.
Household Data includes the aggregated street or household level demographic, financial, social and cultural data or information we hold in relation to UK properties. This information we hold does not relate to any identified individual and is provided to our users and customers on an aggregated, anonymised basis. We do not use this data to profile individuals or provide automated. If this information contains any personally identifiable information we process this information on the basis of our legitimate interest in providing services to customers.
Marketing information includes data we may hold about you in order to provide information about our services this may include names, email addresses, phone numbers, addresses, and other information. We process this information in order to communicate with you about our products and services on the basis of our legitimate interests in communicating with you about our services or on the basis that you have consented to receive the information.

We will collect information either from you directly or from a third party (for instance a database owner). If we do obtain your personal data from a third party your privacy rights under this notice are not affected and you are still able to exercise the rights contained within this notice.

Data Retention

Our current data retention policy is to delete or destroy (to the extent we are able to) personal data after the following periods:

Records relating to a contract with us – 7 years from either the end of the contract or the date you last used our services or placed an order with us, being the length of time following a breach of contract in which a contract party is entitled to make a legal claim.
Personal data relating to our property listing service – 3 years from the date of collection of the relevant data.
Marketing records – 3 years from the last date on which you have interacted with us.

For any category of personal data not specifically defined in this notice, and unless otherwise specified by applicable law, the required retention period for any personal data will be deemed to be 7 years from the date of receipt by us of that data. The retention periods stated in this notice can be prolonged or shortened as may be required (for example, in the event that legal proceedings apply to the data or if there is an on-going investigation into the data).

Aggregated Data

We may anonymise and aggregate information and data relating to enquiries made, properties viewed and other use of our services, and we may combine that data with demographic data to provide analysis, reports and information to our enterprise customers, but we agree that we will not incorporate personal data into any such analysis, report or information.

Sharing your information

We may disclose information to third parties in the following circumstances:

Aggregated or anonymous Household Data may be shared with our customers in the provision of our services;
Enquiry Data and applicable Usage Data for enquirers will be shared with the agent or owner who is responsible for the property the enquiry is submitted in relation to, in order to facilitate a response to your enquiry;
As part of our services we may provide information to our third party service providers;
We may disclose information to our group companies;
if we are under a duty to disclose or share your personal data in order to comply with any legal obligation (for example, if required to do so by a court order or for the purposes of prevention of fraud or other crime);
in order to enforce any terms and conditions or agreements for our services that may apply;
we may transfer your personal information to a third party as part of a sale of some or all of our business and assets to any third party or as part of any business restructuring or reorganisation, but we will take steps with the aim of ensuring that your privacy rights continue to be protected;
to protect our rights, property and safety, or the rights, property and safety of our users or any other third parties. This includes exchanging information with other companies and organisations for the purposes of fraud protection and credit risk reduction.

If we do supply your personal information to a third party we will take steps to ensure that your privacy rights are protected and that third party complies with the terms of this notice.

Security

We will take all reasonable steps to ensure that appropriate technical and organisational measures are carried out in order to safeguard the information we collect from you and protect against unlawful access and accidental loss or damage.

Your privacy rights

With respect to your personal data, you have the right to:

request that your personal data will not be processed;
ask for a copy of any personal data that we have about you;
request a correction of any errors in or update of the personal data that we have about you;
request to exercise your right to be informed – the GDPR gives you the right to know exactly what we do with your personal data
request that your personal data will not be used to contact you for direct marketing purposes;
request that your personal data will not be used for profiling purposes;
request that your personal data will not be used to contact you at all;
request that your personal data be transferred or exported to another organisation, or deleted from our records; or
at any time, withdraw any permission you have given us to process your personal data

All requests or notifications in respect of your above rights may be sent to us in writing at the contact details listed below. We will endeavour to comply with such requests as soon as possible but in any event we will comply within one month of receipt (unless a longer period of time to respond is reasonable by virtue of the complexity or number of your requests).

If personal data we hold about you is subject to a breach or unauthorised disclosure or access, we will report this to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) and/or our data protection manager.

If a breach is likely to result in a risk to your data rights and freedoms, we will notify you as soon as possible.

Transferring your information outside Europe

We will not transfer your personal data in a systematic way outside of the UK or European Economic Area (“EEA”) but there may be circumstances in which certain personal information is transferred outside of the EEA, in particular:

If you use our services while you are outside the EEA, your information may be transferred outside the EEA in order to provide you with our services;
We may communicate with individuals or organisations outside of the services in providing our services, those communications may include personal information (such as contact information) for example you may be outside of the EEA when we communicate with you;
From time to time your information may be stored in devices which are used by our staff outside of the EEA (but staff will be subject to our cyber-security policies to protect such data).

If we transfer your information outside of the EEA, and the third country or international organisation in question has not been deemed by the EU Commission to have adequate data protection laws, we will provide appropriate safeguards and we will be responsible for ensuring your privacy rights continue to be protected as outlined in this notice.

If at any time you would like to contact us with your views about our privacy practices, or with any enquiry or complaint relating to your personal information or how it is handled, you can do so by us using the details below:

Address: 14th Floor 33 Cavendish Square, London, England, W1G 0PW
Data Protection Email: [email protected]

Complaints

If we are unable to resolve any issues you may have or you would like to make a further complaint, you can contact the Information Commissioner’s Office by visiting http://www.ico.org.uk for further assistance.