Legal

Privacy Policy - Selling or Buying

SALES PRIVACY NOTICE

Effective date: 15^th February 2021

Updated: 5th November 2023 [DPO changed]

Introduction

Beresfords is committed to protecting the privacy and security of your personal information. We take care to protect the privacy of our prospective buyers and sellers. This information is required to process and maintain your prospective purchase or sale with Beresfords as described in this privacy notice.

We have therefore developed this Privacy Notice to inform you of the data we collect, what we do with your information, how we store it, 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 Regulations which is the governing legislation that regulates data protection across the EEA. This includes any replacement legislation coming into effect from time to time.

Bulletproof

Email address: dposupport@bulletproof.co.uk

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. This policy is designed to make you aware of how and why your personal data will be used, namely for the prospective purchase or sale as mentioned above, and how long it will usually be retained for. It provides you with certain information that must be provided under the Data Protection Act 2018.

In general, we use your personal information to comply with the law, carry out our obligations to you and to ensure you are and remain a buyer or vendor and able to fulfil your obligations to us.

2. What personal information is collected?

When you take on our sales services, we will collect, store, and use the following categories of personal information about you:

Full name.
Full address.
Email address.
Contact telephone numbers.
Full address of property for sale (sellers only).
Your identity and address documents to fulfil our Anti Money Laundering obligations.
Your communication and marketing preferences.
Financial viability information (proof of funds, bank statements, solicitors’ letter, mortgage agreement in principle)
For any prospective purchase or sale, we will not collect any special category personal data such as ethnicity, religion, health, or criminal conviction data.
In certain cases, voice recordings of telephone conversations for training, quality assurance, and monitoring purposes.

3. 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 to market your property for sale (sellers only) or enquire about purchasing a property.
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 and people you are linked to financially
We also may gather personal information from monitoring or recording calls and if we use CCTV. We may record or monitor phone calls with you for regulatory purposes, for training and to ensure and improve quality of service delivery, to ensure safety of our staff and customers, and to resolve queries or issues. We may also use CCTV on our premises to ensure the safety and security of our staff and customers.

4. How we use information about you and our legal basis

The law requires that we provide you with information about the legal basis on which we process your personal data, and for what purposes.

In general terms, we will use the personal information we collect about you to:

To process your registration with us.
To provide a full sales service to both sellers and buyers.
To create invoices for payments of our services.
To protect against and prevent fraud, unauthorised transactions, money laundering, tax evasion, claims, other liabilities, and compliance.
To communicate with you about the sales process.
To deal with legal disputes involving you.
To comply with health and safety obligations.
To prevent fraud.
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 you have entered into a contract with us
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 and fundamental rights 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.

5. Sharing your Information

We may share personal data with third parties such as: Other estate agents, surveying companies, solicitors, Flagstone Financial (Beresfords financial services sister company https://www.flagstone.co.uk/) for any mortgages that may be taken with them, corporate clients, building contractors, professional photography companies, or Energy Performance Certificate providers.

The below is a non-exhaustive list of why we would be required to share your personal information with other third parties:

To help market the property (photographers and/or Energy Performance Certificate providers)
To help obtain quotes for the services required in buying or selling a property (solicitors, Flagstone Financial, surveying companies)
To help progress a sale (other estate agents, solicitors, Flagstone Financial, surveying companies)
To provide a language translation service if it is necessary to translate any information into or from a foreign language for you.
To carry out research, survey, and segmentation on our behalf to help us to improve the services we offer to you, and
With our professional and legal advisors for the purposes of taking advice.

If we are to use any third-party contractors to carry out any services on our behalf, we will ensure our contractors are required to comply with the law and our own Data Processing Agreement or Data Processing Clauses within our contracts to ensure data is managed appropriately and for specified purposes.

We may need to share personal information with local authorities, government departments and agencies, with our regulator and auditors, with utility companies or with other organisations and agencies where we are legally allowed to do so.

We may be required to share personal information with statutory or regulatory authorities and organisations to comply with statutory obligations.

In the event that we do share personal information with external third parties, we will only share such personal information strictly required for the specific lawful purposes and take reasonable steps to ensure that recipients shall 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 purposes. We only permit them to process your personal data for specified purposes and in accordance with our instructions.

In the event that a complaint is received by us from you, it may be necessary to share your information with third parties such as (but not limited to) Solicitor firms and The Property Ombudsman.

We provide a link from our website to Google Maps to show the location of properties we are marketing or the location of our offices. If you use or access Google Maps you are bound by Google Maps/Google Earth Additional Terms of Service including the Google Privacy Policy.

6. Marketing

Beresfords undertake general marketing initiatives to help promote our products and services. In each communication you have the ability to opt out and unsubscribe. We do not share any personal data for marketing purposes with any third-party companies and all Beresfords marketing is carried out by our own marketing department.

7. 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 business need-to-know. 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 required to do so.

Your personal information is stored on our paper and IT 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 services to you. All data is held within the UK.

If any of your personal information is transferred out of 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.

8. 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 personal information we hold after its retention period. You can request a copy of our Retention Policy by contacting us at data@beresfords.co.uk

9. 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 check 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 data@beresfords.co.uk

If you have any questions about this privacy notice or how we handle your personal information, please contact the DPO using their details above or data@beresfords.co.uk

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 - https://ico.org.uk/

Telephone helpline - 0303 123 1113