McGeown Estate Agents is committed to keeping your information secure and private and in accordance with the requirements of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Physical and electronic measures have been put in place to keep your data safe. This guide sets out the key points in relation to why we collect and process your personal data, the types of personal data we will process and hold about you, and for how long we will keep the data before destroying it. This guide also provides a summary of your legal rights as a data subject, information about any third party organisations that we may share your data with or may share data with us about you.
Purpose and basis for processing your personal dataWe collect and store information from you to provide a service to you. This information is collected in various ways, including:
- Directly from you in application forms, email and letters, telephone calls and conversations with our staff
- Through our website when you register for property updates, send an email enquiry or request a property valuation
- Information we receive via an enquiry that you make on a third party property portal (eg: propertynews.com ; propertypal.com);
- From your professional financial or legal representatives;
- From other individuals who know you.
Data protection law says that we can only use personal data if we have a proper reason to do so including fulfilling a contract we have with you, when we have a legal duty, when it is in our legitimate interest or when you consent to its use.
We will rely on any of the following legal basis for processing your personal data:- The processing is necessary if we have entered into a contract with you as a Vendor or Landlord;
- The processing is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation for such things as money laundering checks;
- The processing is necessary for the purposes of legitimate interests which are required to protect the commercial or core interests of McGeown Estate Agents or someone else. This would include the details of a person before agreeing to do a viewing in order to protect our staff or processing data to carry out repairs to a tenanted property.
McGeown Estate Agents will seek your verifiable consent in respect to receiving marketing material. We do not share or give any information to a third party for their own marketing purposes.
Categories of Personal DataExamples of the personal data McGeown Estate Agents holds about you include:
- Personal information, such as your name, address, date of birth, telephone numbers and email address
- Details about you proving your identity
- Personal information provided by you as evidence of the source of your funds for the purchase of a property
- Personal information provided by you in support of a tenancy application eg: employment details and bank account details
Recipients of your personal data
Information about you may be used within McGeown Estate Agents for all purposes necessary for performing our contract with you but we may disclose your personal information to other service providers, agents and subcontractors such as Photographers, Surveyors, Solicitors and Tradesmen (eg: Maintenance Contractor; Plumber; Inventory Clerk) to provide services on our behalf. This may require these organisations or individuals to access and process your personal data.
Retention Period
We will keep your information as long as permitted for our legitimate business purposes and for any retention period that we are legally required to meet. Our current practise is to maintain records for 7 years after transacting business.
Your Data Protection rights- Your right to be informed: You have the right to be provided with clear, transparent and easily understandable information about how we use your personal data and your rights. We fulfil this right by giving you this notice.
- Access to your personal data: You can request access to a copy of your personal data that we process as a data controller, together with details of why we use it, who we share it with, how long we keep it for and whether it has been used for any automated decision making.
- Right to withdraw consent: If you have given us your consent, you can withdraw that consent at any time. Please contact us if you want to do so. If you withdraw your consent, we may not be able to provide certain products or services to you. If this is the case, we will tell you.
- Right to object: You may object to our processing of your personal data by us, where this processing is based on our legitimate interests or in the public interest. We will assess whether our interest in continuing to process your personal data overrides your rights and freedoms. If not, we will stop processing your personal data. Either way, we will inform you of the outcome.
You have the right to object to direct marketing (including marketing-related profiling) and if you do so, we must stop these types of activities. (See “Automated decision making and profiling” and “Marketing” below.)
- Rectification: You can ask us to change or complete any inaccurate or incomplete personal data held about you.
- Erasure: This is also known as “the right to be forgotten” and this means that you can ask us to delete your personal data where it is no longer necessary for us to use it, you have withdrawn consent (where applicable), or where we have no lawful basis for keeping it or otherwise using it. There are limited exceptions, for example where we need to use the information to bring or defend a legal claim.
- Portability: You can ask us to provide you or a third party with some of the personal data that we hold about you in a structured, commonly used, electronic form, so it can be easily transferred. This is limited to personal data you have provided with your consent or in relation to the products you have with us, and which we process by automated means, such as your account transaction data.
- Restriction: You can ask us to restrict the personal data we use about you were:
- it is inaccurate;
- you have asked for it to be erased;
- you have objected to our use of it; or
- where you need this for the bringing or defending of legal claims.
When you have asked us to restrict the use of your personal data we may still store your information but will not use it further without your consent, unless we need to process it:
- to bring or defend legal claims;
- to protect the rights and freedoms of other individuals; or
- for other important public interest reasons.
