PRIVACY POLICY
Residence Index UK Ltd.
CONSUMER PRIVACY POLICY 2023
WHO WE ARE
We are Residence Index UK Ltd. House4students is a trading and brand name of Residence Index, registered in England 13186305, and our registered office is 167-169 Great Portland Street, 5th Floor, London W1W 5PF (referred to as “we”, “us” or “our”). we are the providers of student accommodation, lettings agents to Landlords and also run the portal where landlords and agents can also advertise directly.
we provide the website so that our members can advertise property details for you to view. “our Members” include estate agents, commercial agents, letting agents, landlords, new homes developers and overseas property owners. we are not an estate agency.
A reference to “you” or “your” is a reference to a user of the website or any of our services.
A reference to “users” is a reference to individuals using our website or services.
INTRODUCTION
We are committed to protecting your privacy. This privacy policy (referred to as the “Policy”) explains how and for what purposes we use the information collected about you, when you use the site to search for property or Register with us as provider (landlord or agent).
If you have a query about information relating to your property on the website, please contact your estate agent or lettings agent directly or alternatively contact us on feedback@house4studentds.co.uk .
CONTACTING US
If you would like to stop receiving marketing and communications from us please contact us via email at info@house4students.co.uk or write to us at 167-169 Great Portland Street, 5th Floor, London W1W 5PF.
If you have any questions about this Policy or our use of your personal information or would like to submit a subject access request or exercise your other data subject rights, please contact our Data Protection Officer via email at dataprotections@house4studentds.co.uk or write to us at 167-169 Great Portland Street, 5th Floor, London W1W 5PF.
WHAT PERSONAL DATA DO WE COLLECT ABOUT YOU?
PROPERTIES ADVERTISED ON THE SITE
What we collect and where it comes from
- In the course of providing our services, we collect property data such as images of properties, including videos and virtual tours, property and room rental prices, property addresses, property locations and property descriptions.
- The property data is provided to by us directly or by our members.
Why we collect it
- we will use this information for a number of reasons including:
- to provide the House4students website.
- to enable our members to advertise their properties.
- to enable potential tenants to see detailed descriptions and images of properties that they may be interested in;
- to allow users to see current property trends such as the prices of houses for rent and
- for our own commercial purposes such as to identify trends in the property market, automated survey and valuation tools, and to build property databases.
Our lawful basis for processing this personal data
- we have a legitimate interest to process this information. These legitimate interests are:
- providing a service to our members by helping them to market properties and understand changing market dynamics and evolving trends;
- providing a service to our members by advertising properties to potential tenants;
- providing a service to potential tenants so that they know what properties are currently on the market and the price of those properties; and
How long we will keep it for
- we will stop advertising a property when we are instructed to do so by our members or if we directly agree a let.
- However, the property information will remain available on the website as historical property information to allow users to benefit from services such as identifying previous rental prices.
HISTORICAL PROPERTY DATA
What we collect and where it comes from
- If a property has previously been actively marketed on the website, we will continue to display it on the site as historical property information. If you have any concerns about any historical property information available on the site, please see the section of this Policy entitled “Removing Property Data from the site” (below).
Why we collect it
- we will use this information:
- to assist potential tenants when forming a view about historical market trends and potential property values;
- to assist vendors when researching the approximate value of their property;
- to enable users to see detailed property descriptions and images of properties in areas that they may be interested in;
- to allow users to see property trends that they may be interested in, such as the previous rental prices of houses in their local area; and
- for our other commercial purposes, such as to identify trends in the property market and automated survey and valuation tools, and to build property databases.
Our lawful basis for processing this personal data
- we have a legitimate interest to process this information. These legitimate interests are:
- to enhance the service that we provide on the website and providing a service that benefits our members, website users, landlords and tenants;
- to provide a service to our members by assisting them to more accurately value other properties;
- to provide a service to angents and landlords to form a view about the value of their properties;
- providing a service to potential purchasers and tenants in understanding what properties have been on the market and the prices of those properties; and
- to provide data services to third parties such as banks, building societies, insurance companies and other financial institutions so that they can process this historic property data for their purposes, including using the data in services such as property valuation models or surveyor comparison software.
How long we will keep it for
To the extent that property data is also personal data, it is generally the case that it ceases to be personal data over time. The historic property data is retained by us in accordance with our property database and remains necessary in order for us to provide the services summarised in the “why we collect it” box. If you have concerns about historical property information featured on our website and you can prove to us that you have a valid association to the property you are concerned about, please contact us at info@houses4students.co.uk.
INFORMATION YOU GIVE TO US
What we collect and where it comes from
- we will collect the information that you give to us when using our website or services:
Enquiries to our members
- if you choose to access a particular search feature, request information or fill in a form on the website you may be asked to provide information about yourself, such as:
- your name, address and contact details
- details of the sort of property you are interested in
- the cost and location of the property, and
- your current residential address
- If you choose to book an appointment to view a property via the website, you may be asked to provide more details, including:
- your availability to view the property
- your preferred moving date
- details of your household income as a proxy for calculating affordability in relation to the advertised monthly rental value of a property
- an indication of whether you are moving alone or with others, and
- your feedback on a property that you have viewed,
- If you choose to contact us or a member, calls may be recorded for training and monitoring purposes.
- if you choose to access a particular search feature, request information or fill in a form on the website you may be asked to provide information about yourself, such as:
Registered users and Property Alerts:
- information that you provide to us when you register as a house4students user and/or request property email updates such as Property Alerts about when a property is marketed in your chosen postcode and meeting your search parameters;
General use of the website:
- information that you provide when downloading the App or registering to use the App;
- information that you provide when participating in discussion boards or other social media functions on our website
Communications:
- information that you provide to us by corresponding with us by phone, e-mail or otherwise;
- if you choose to contact us by phone or we call you, calls may be recorded for training and monitoring purposes. we may also keep a record of call activity, including missed calls.
Investors
- information that you provide to us when browsing our investor information.
Why we collect it
- we will use this information:
Enquiries to our members:
- to make sure that you receive the benefit of the House4students service. This may include:
- transferring your property enquiry to our member advertising that property so that they can respond to your enquiry. Some of our members may use lead handling agencies who handle and process your enquiry on their behalf; or
- sending your request to book a property viewing to our member advertising that property and for us to confirm your booking by email or text on our member’s behalf;
- sending your name, address and contact details to our member when you request information or a brochure on a property they are advertising, so that they can contact you;
- transferring other relevant information to our member so that they can assess whether the property is suitable for you;
- enabling us to send you a link to access an online viewing of the property you have enquired about; and
- allowing you to provide our member with feedback on the property once you have viewed it;
- for training and monitoring purposes where calls are recorded;
- to profile your lead activity on our website or telephone calls to our members for monitoring and training purposes and to enhance the service you receive from our Members. If you want to know more about this, see “Lead Profiling” below
- to make sure that you receive the benefit of the House4students service. This may include:
Registered users and Property Alerts:
- to provide you with the benefit of services for registered users only;
- to provide Property Alerts to you for properties marketed on our website that meet your search criteria;
General use of the website:
- to provide the website to you;
- to enhance the services that you select on our website;
- to process any queries that you have about House4students or its members;
- to customise and enrich your experience on our website;
- to contact you for your views on our services and to notify you occasionally about important changes to our Terms of use or this Policy or developments to our website or services;
- to deliver relevant advertising to you whilst you are on the website;
Communications:
- to process and resolve any queries that you may have;
- for training and monitoring purposes where calls are recorded; and
Investor Relations:
- to allow you to subscribe for relevant House4students regulatory alerts;
- to process and respond to any queries that you might have.
Our lawful basis for processing this personal data
- we have a legitimate business interest to process this information. These legitimate interests are:
- Enquiries to our members: to provide a service to our members and/or to provide a service to you;
- Registered user and Property Alerts: to provide you with our services;
- General use of the website: to enable you to download and use the App and gain information about the use of our website and any improvements that can be made as well as providing advertising space to our members and third parties;
- Communications: to ensure that your queries are addressed;
- for training and monitoring purposes where calls are recorded; and.
- Investor Relations: to allow you to access House4students regulatory alerts and to ensure that your queries are addressed.
How long we will keep it for
We will store the information summarised above for the following periods:
Enquiries to our members
- all enquiry data will be kept for two years from the date on which you last used our website or our services. After that it will be erased or anonymised so that the data no longer identifies you;
- telephone call recordings are stored for a shorter period of time, being three months from the date of the recording, at which point they are deleted;
- profiling data will be kept for a shorter time period, as described in “Lead Profiling” below.
Registered users and Property Alerts:
- Information that you provide to us when you register as a House4students user will be kept for as long as you have an active account setup on House4students. The personal data relating to your account will be deleted when you delete your account or if your account has been inactive for 2 years (from March 2021), whichever is earlier.
General use of the website:
- information that is provided when you interact with us through social media functions will only be retained on the social media website which you use to contact us. we will not copy or store it separately. This data will be retained for as long as you keep it on your social media accounts.
Communications:
- Information that you provide to us when we correspond by phone, e-mail or otherwise will be retained for the later of 18 months from the date of communication or until your query is resolved.
Investors
- Information that you provide to us when browsing our investor information will be kept for as long as you maintain a user account. Any data which we hold will be deleted when you delete your account.
INFORMATION WE COLLECT ABOUT YOU
What we collect and where it comes from
- This is different to “information you give us” because it relates to technical data that we collect. we may:
- collect technical information that has the potential to identify you, including the type of Device you use, a unique identifier (for example, your Device’s IMEI number), the internet protocol (IP) used to connect your computer to the internet, the MAC address of the Device’s wireless network interface, or the mobile phone number, your login by the Device, mobile network information, your mobile operating system, the type of mobile browser you use and time zone setting, the browser plug-in types and versions, operating system and website;
- collect information about your visit to the site, including the full uniform resource locators (URL) clickstream to, through and from our site (including date and time), products you viewed or searched for, page response times, download errors, length of visits to certain pages, page interaction information (such as scrolling, clicks and mouse-overs) and methods used to browse away from the page.
- use GPS technology on your Device to determine your current location. Some of our location-enabled services require your personal data for the feature to work;
Why we collect it
- we will use the information summarised above:
- to provide the website to you;
- to conduct reviews that assist us in the improvement and optimisation of our website;
- to ensure that content from our website is presented in the most effective manner for you and for your device;
- to administer our website and for internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research, statistical and survey purposes;
- as part of our efforts to keep our website safe and secure;
- to customise and enrich your experience on our website;
- to provide you with GPS enabled functionality; and
Our lawful basis for processing this personal data
- we have a legitimate interest to process this information. These legitimate interests are:
- to help ensure the on-going security of the website;
- enhancing the service that you receive on the website; and
- providing information necessary to enable us to provide competitive, cost effective services.
How long we will keep it for
We will store this personal data for two years in order to allow us to review and monitor normal traffic patterns and trends on our website. After two years this data may be kept in an anonymous form.
LEAD PROFILING
we may from time to time profile your activity when using our services or our website. This profiling is limited in its scope to telephone and email enquiries you send to our members. It only takes place to help us and our members understand what sort of properties you may be interested in and any properties you may have for let, and to categorise your activity to help us and our members determine how likely you are to require services from our members. Members may then contact you to offer their services, although they can only do so if they have a lawful reason to do so (known as a lawful basis of processing your personal data). you can always object to our profiling by emailing us here dataprotections@house4studentds.co.uk . Any profiling data that we hold about you will only be kept for a period of 12 months from the date of the last telephone or email you have sent to a House4students member.
USE OF YOUR DATA FOR MARKETING AND COMMUNICATIONS
Sometimes we may use your personal information to provide marketing messages to you. You can opt out of marketing and other communications at any time by contacting feedback@house4studentds.co.uk. You can always make use of the website without having to agree to marketing. The types of things that we may do include:
- providing direct marketing advertisements and communications to you via email, text, post or telephone;
- making suggestions and recommendations to you and other users of our website about goods or services that may interest you or them;
- communicating with you on third party social media website; and
- monitoring the effectiveness of our direct marketing communications and your responses to it.
REMOVING PROPERTY DATA FROM THE SITE
If you have any concerns about the properties advertised on the website, please contact us at dataprotection@house4students.co.uk and we will endeavour to resolve the issue promptly.
If you are a vendor or landlord of a property that is being actively marketed on the website by an agent and you want this removed, please contact your estate agent or lettings agent directly in the first instance
If you have concerns about historical property information about a property featured on our website and you can prove to us that you have a valid association to that property, please contact us at feedback@house4students.co.uk.
WHO HAS ACCESS TO YOUR PERSONAL DATA?
We retain access to all personal information that we have collected from you or about you. Once your information has been passed to one of our members in the course of providing our services (most typically when you communicate with an estate agent through our website) then that House4students member will have a copy of the information that you have provided within your enquiry and your contact details which they will use to get in touch with you. In relation to property data, it is provided to us by our members (or third parties that act on their behalf). Our members (or any third party that acts on their behalf) will be responsible for information in their possession and that information will be subject to any privacy terms or policies that the member has in place; we are not responsible for use (or misuse) of your information by any of our members.
When our service is available via the website of our partners, those partners may have access to your information. We are not responsible for the content, security, privacy policies and practices of any other website, even if you access them using links from our website or if you can access our website or use our services from them. We recommend that you check the policy of each website that you visit and make sure that you are comfortable with the terms of such policies before providing any personal information.
If our business is sold or merged, or if we sell or buy any business or assets, we may disclose your personal data to the prospective seller or buyer of such business or assets. We will make sure that any such transfer is done in a secure way.
If we offer or supply a service to you that is provided on our behalf by a third party, we may have to pass your information to them in order to deliver the service. The categories of third parties (who are acting as Data Processors which means they are responsible for processing personal data on behalf of us) include: telephone call recording and our support ticketing systems. We may also use third parties to provide services on our behalf which may include processing (but not using themselves) your information e.g. to complete partial addresses or to augment the information we hold about you. In either case, we will not pass your information to anyone who is not also subject to adequate privacy commitments in our contract with them.
We will not otherwise disclose, sell or distribute your information to any third party without your permission unless we are required to do so by law or to obtain professional advice.
WHERE DO WE STORE YOUR PERSONAL DATA?
The data that we collect from you may be transferred to, and stored at, a destination outside the European Economic Area (“EEA”). It may also be processed by staff operating outside the EEA who work for us or for one of our suppliers or contractors. Territories outside of the EEA may not have equivalent legal protections to those that apply within the EEA, but we are under a duty to make sure that our suppliers and contractors located outside of the EEA continue to take all steps reasonably necessary to ensure that your data is treated securely and in accordance with this Policy. By submitting your personal data to us, you agree to this transfer, storing or processing.
Unfortunately, the transmission of information via the internet is not completely secure. Although we will do our best to protect your personal data, we cannot guarantee the security of your data transmitted to our website; any transmission is at your own risk. Once we have received your information, we will use strict procedures and security features to try to prevent unauthorised access.
We follow strict security procedures to ensure that your personal information is not damaged, destroyed or disclosed to a third party without your permission and to prevent unauthorised access to it. The computers that store the information are kept in a secure facility with restricted physical access and we use secure firewalls and other measures to restrict electronic access. If we are working with third parties, we will require them to have in place similar measures to protect your information.
Only employees who need access to your information to perform a specific job are granted access to personally identifiable information. We may require you to co-operate with our security checks before we disclose information to you. If you are a registered user, you can update the personal information held in your My account (that you give us) at any time by viewing www.house4students.co.uk
Where we have given you (or where you have chosen) a password which enables you to access certain parts of the website, you are responsible for keeping this password confidential. We ask you not to share your password with anyone.
YOUR RIGHTS
You have the right to ask us not to process your personal data at any time.
You have the right to use our website without consenting to marketing and the communication services that we provide. We will inform you (before collecting your data) if we intend to use your data for such purposes or if we intend to disclose your information to any third party for such purposes. We always use the most recently submitted form to be your current consent status. If you are a registered user, but not signed in when you submit a form, we will not be able to use your saved settings so will deem your consent choice to be as per the form you submit at the time. You can exercise your right to prevent such processing by selecting the specific options in the fields or forms when you become a registered user.
You have a right to request access to or rectification of your personal data which we hold about you. You also have a right to erase your personal data, to restrict the processing of your personal data and the right to receive your personal data that you have provided to us, the right to object to our processing of your personal data and a right to request that we transmit your personal data to another data controller.
Where we process your personal data because you have given us your consent to do so, you have the right to withdraw your consent at any time.
To exercise any of these rights, please contact dataprotection@house4students.co.uk.
You have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office if you feel unhappy with the way we process your data. Please visit you.ico.org.uk for more information.
COOKIES AND TRACKING
Like many website and App providers, we use “cookies” to enable us to personalise your visits to our website, simplify the signing-in procedure, keep track of your preferences and to track the usage of our website. For full details about what cookies we set and why we use them, please see our Cookie Policy available here.
CHANGES TO THIS POLICY
We may change the terms of this Policy at any time. Any changes we may make to this Policy in the future will be posted on the website.
You may be required to read and accept any new Policy terms to continue your use of the website. The amended terms will be made available with new uploads or updates of the website and will be displayed in the Privacy Policy.
Please check back frequently to see any updates or changes to this Policy, as you will be deemed to accept such changes from your continued use of our website.
Issue date: 7th March 2023
Updated 19th January 2024