Privacy Policy - Landlords
LANDLORDS PRIVACY NOTICE
Effective Date 3 June 2021
Updated: 5th November 2023 [DPO change]
Introduction
Beresfords is committed to protecting the privacy and security of your personal information. We take care to protect the privacy of landlords and have developed this Privacy Notice to inform you of the data we collect, what we do with your information, how its kept secure as well as the rights and choices you have over your personal information.
Throughout this document we refer to Data Protection Legislation which means the Data Protection Act 2018 which incorporates the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003 and any legislation implemented in connection with the General Data Protection Regulation which is the governing legislation that regulates data protection across the EEA. This includes any replacement legislation coming into effect from time to time.
Our Data Protection Officer is;
Bulletproof
Email address: dposupport@bulletproof.co.uk
Policy Index
- Your Rights.
- Data Retention.
- Data Security.
- Sharing your Information.
- How we use information about you and our legal basis.
- How we gather personal information.
- What personal information is being collected.
- Purpose of this document
1. Purpose of this document
Beresfords is a "data controller". This means that we are responsible for deciding how we hold and use personal information about you.
In general, we use your personal information to comply with the law and carry out our obligations as you letting agent.
2. What personal information is being collected
When you take on our letting services, we will collect, store, and use the following categories of personal information about you:
- Full name.
- Main postal address.
- Email address.
- Contact telephone numbers.
- Full details of any investment properties upon which you have sought some form of advice from Beresfords
- Bank details for payment of rent and related expenses
- Details surrounding your identity and place of residence to fulfil our Anti Money Laundering obligations.
- Your communication and marketing preferences.
- In certain cases, voice recordings of telephone conversations for training, quality assurance and monitoring purposes.
How we gather personal information
We gather personal information:
- Directly from you, for example when you call to ask us and when we call you for advice regarding the possible marketing of a rental property or require some form of assistance on an existing tenancy.
- By observing how you use our products and services, for example from the transactions and operation of your accounts and services from other organisations such as credit reference and fraud prevention agencies.
- From other people who know you including joint account holders, guarantors and others linked to financially.
- We also may gather personal information from monitoring or recording calls and where we retain CCTV equipment on our premises. Telephone calls may be monitored for regulatory purposes and/or training to ensure and improve quality of service delivery, safety of our staff or customers, and to resolve queries or issues.
4. How we use information about you and our legal basis
The law requires that we provide you with information about the legal basis upon which we process your personal data, and for what purposes.
In general terms, we will use the personal information we collect about you to:
- Maintain accurate records of any rental properties owned by you.
- Contact you regarding the potential marketing of your rental property/s.
- Provide a full lettings service if instructed to market your rental property/s.
- Offer ‘full management’ services during an active ‘managed’ tenancy.
- Process payments of rent from tenants
- Protect against and prevent fraud, unauthorised transactions, money laundering, tax evasion, claims, other liabilities, and compliance.
- Deal with any disputes be they from a legal perspective or otherwise.
- Comply with health and safety obligations.
- Any other process directly linked to either the initial marketing of a property for rent, management of a tenancy or related issues thereafter.
- For training, quality assurance and monitoring purposes.
Some of the above grounds for processing will overlap and there may be several grounds which justify our use of your personal information.
- Where we need to comply with a legal obligation.
- Where it is necessary for our legitimate interests (or those of a third party) and your interests plus any fundamental rights which do not override those interests.
You will not be subject to decisions that will have a significant impact on you based solely on automated decision-making.
Special protection is given to certain kinds of personal information that is particularly sensitive. This includes information about your health status, political views, religious or similar beliefs, racial or ethnic origin, sex life or sexual orientation, genetic or biometric identifiers, trade union membership or criminal convictions or allegations. We will only use this kind of personal information where:
- We have a legal obligation to do so.
- It is necessary for us to do so to protect your vital interests.
- It is in the substantial public interest.
- Necessary for the prevention or detection of crime.
- Required for insurance purposes.
- You have given explicit consent to use the information.
5. Sharing your Information
We may share limited personal data with third party contractors such as: Referencing Companies, Rent Warranty Providers, Letting Board Contractors, other Estate/Letting Agents, Surveying Companies, Corporate Clients, Building Contractors, Property Maintenance Contractors, Inventory Clerks or Energy Performance Certificate providers.
These are parties who are carrying out services on our behalf including but not restricted to:
- Referencing, Credit Checks, Rent Warranties, and Insurance.
- Erection/Collection of To Let/Let/By Boards
- Estate & Lettings Services
- Structural Surveys
- Relocation Services
- Planning Advice and related Applications
- Property Maintenance Quotations and Repairs
- Property Inspections & Related Inspection Reports
- Language Translation
- Data Services
- Legal Advice
- General Accounts Services, Accountants and Auditors
- Related Regulatory Bodies
- Local Authorities and Utility Providers
Our contractors are required to comply with the law and our own Data Processing Agreement or Data Processing Clauses within our contracts ensure data is managed appropriately and for specified purposes.
We may also need to share personal information with other government departments, agencies, or organisations where we are legally allowed/required to do so.
Where personal information is provided to external third parties, we will only share such what is required for the specific lawful purposes and take reasonable steps to ensure recipients only process the disclosed personal information in accordance with those purposes.
All our third-party service providers and other entities in the group are required to take appropriate security measures to protect your personal information in line with our policies. We do not allow our third-party service providers to use your personal data for their own purpose, only permit them to process your personal data for specified purposes and in accordance with our instructions.
Where a complaint is received by us from you, it may be necessary to share your information with specific third parties such as (but not limited to) Lawyers, The Property Ombudsman, and other related Regulatory Bodies.
Every property promoted for rent on those property portals to which we subscribe retain a specific ‘location link’ that works in conjunction with Google Maps. This helps identify the specific geographical location of the property in question. Anyone accessing such links are bound by Google Maps/Google Earths additional Terms of Service including the Google own Privacy Policy.
6. Data Security
We have put in place appropriate security measures to prevent your personal information from being accidentally lost, used or accessed in an unauthorised way, altered, or disclosed. In addition, we limit access to your personal information to those employees, agents, contractors and other third parties who have a legitimate business reason for doing so. They will only process your personal information on our instructions and are subject to a duty of confidentiality.
We have put in place procedures to deal with any suspected data security breach and will notify you and any applicable regulator of a suspected breach where we are legally obliged to do so.
Your personal information is stored on our paper and IT based filing systems which may be copied for testing, backup, archiving and disaster recovery purposes. Access to your information is limited to those who require it to provide related services to you. All data is held within the UK.
If any of your personal information is transferred out with the European Union or the European Economic Area by any of our contractors, we will ensure that there are adequate safeguards in place to protect your personal information in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulations and applicable UK Data Protection Legislation.
7. Data Retention
The personal information that you provide will be retained by us in accordance with applicable laws and our internal Retention Policy. We will only hold your personal information on our systems for as long as is necessary and will destroy or de-identify any personal information we hold after expiry of the pre-specified retention period. You can request a copy of our Retention Policy by contacting us at:
Data Privacy Manager
Beresfords Lettings Ltd, 10 Springfield Lyons Approach, Chelmsford,
Essex, CM2 5LB data@beresfords.co.uk
8. Your Rights
Under certain circumstances, by law you have the right to:
- Request access to your personal information (commonly known as a "data subject access request"). This enables you to receive a copy of the personal information we hold about you and to check that we are lawfully processing it.
- Request correction of the personal information that we hold about you. This enables you to have any incomplete or inaccurate information we hold about you corrected.
- Request erasure of your personal information. This enables you to ask us to delete or remove personal information where there is no good reason for us continuing to process it. You also have the right to ask us to delete or remove your personal information where you have exercised your right to object to processing (see below).
- Object to processing of your personal information where we are relying on a legitimate interest (or those of a third party) and there is something about your situation which makes you want to object to processing on this ground. You also have the right to object where we are processing your personal information for direct marketing purposes.
- Request the restriction of processing of your personal information. This enables you to ask us to suspend the processing of personal information about you, for example if you want us to establish its accuracy or the reason for processing it.
- Request the transfer of your personal information to another party.
If you want to review, verify, correct, or request erasure of your personal information, object to the processing of your personal data, or request that we transfer a copy of your personal information to another party, please contact our Data Privacy Manager (see Section 7 above).
If you have any questions about this privacy notice or how we handle your personal information, please contact our DPO (See section headed Introduction).
You have the right to make a complaint at any time to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), the UK supervisory authority for data protection issues.
Information Commissioner - Telephone helpline - 0303 123 1113