Privacy Policy
Last updated
Your privacy matters to us. This policy explains what personal information Rest Assured Homes collects, why we collect it, who we share it with, and the choices and rights you have. We have written it in plain English. If anything is unclear, please ask us.
1. Who is responsible for your information
The "controller" of your personal information is:
Rest Assured Homes.
2. The information we collect
- Account details: your email address, title, name, phone number, country, time zone, and your location (a postcode you give us, or the location your browser shares if you allow it).
- Property details: address, type, bedrooms, asking price, how quickly you need to sell, condition, parking, garden, any description you write, and the photos you upload. Photos are re-saved without camera metadata such as GPS location.
- Your circumstances: if you tell us why you are selling (for example probate, divorce or financial difficulty) we record a category and, where you tell us, your own words. This can be sensitive. We keep it private to our team and show buyers only the category, never your personal story.
- Conversations with Amelia: the messages you send and the replies you receive.
- Buyer activity: your saved searches, favourites, and the listings you open. Sellers see only counts (for example "saved by 3 buyers"), never who you are.
- Payments: handled by Stripe. We receive confirmation of payment and subscription status, not your full card number.
- Technical information: your IP address and basic device and browser information, used for security, fraud prevention and to protect the sign-in system from abuse.
- Emails and notifications: a record of the emails we send you and whether they were delivered.
3. How and why we use your information
| What we do | Why we are allowed to (lawful basis) |
|---|---|
| Create your account, sign you in, and run the Service you asked for | Contract |
| Publish your listing to subscribed buyers and let them contact you | Your consent, which you can withdraw by deactivating your listing |
| Take payments and manage subscriptions | Contract, and legal obligations (tax and accounting) |
| Send sign-in codes, confirmation links, listing and billing messages | Contract |
| Send you daily alerts for searches you have saved | Contract (you asked for them) |
| Send occasional news or updates by email | Legitimate interests, or consent where the law requires it. Every message has an unsubscribe link |
| Keep the Service secure, prevent fraud and misuse, fix problems and improve the Service | Legitimate interests |
| Meet legal and regulatory duties and respond to lawful requests | Legal obligation |
Where we use your sensitive circumstances (such as bereavement), we do so only because you chose to give them to us, and only to help your enquiry.
4. Our AI assistant
Amelia is an AI assistant. The messages you type in the chat are sent securely to our AI provider, Anthropic (the Claude model), so that it can generate replies and record your details. Anthropic acts on our instructions as a processor. The assistant does not make legally binding decisions about you. Please do not type information you do not want recorded, such as passwords or card numbers.
5. Who we share your information with
- Subscribed buyers see your name, contact details, address, description and photos only if you agreed to share your listing, and only while it is live.
- Service providers (processors) who help us run the Service, under contract: Anthropic (AI assistant), Stripe (payments), Brevo (email delivery), Amazon Web Services (photo storage), Ably (real-time notifications), postcodes.io (turning postcodes into map locations), and our website hosting provider.
- Professional advisers, regulators, law enforcement and courts where the law requires it or to protect rights, safety and property.
- If our business is sold or reorganised, your information may transfer to the new owner, who must respect this policy.
We do not sell your personal information, and we do not allow anyone to use it for their own advertising.
6. Transfers outside the UK
Some of our providers are based outside the UK, notably in the United States. Where that happens we make sure the transfer is protected, for example by using the UK International Data Transfer Agreement or Addendum, or an approved data-bridge arrangement, together with contractual and technical safeguards.
7. How long we keep it
- Listing photos are permanently deleted from our storage as soon as a listing is deactivated, sold or withdrawn, or when it expires.
- Sign-in codes expire after 10 minutes and are stored only in scrambled (hashed) form.
- We keep other information only for as long as we need it for the purposes above, including to meet legal, tax and accounting requirements, to resolve disputes and to keep the Service safe. When we no longer need it we delete or anonymise it.
- You can ask us to delete your account and personal information at any time (see "Your rights").
8. Cookies
We use only the cookies that are strictly necessary to run the Service: a session cookie that keeps you signed in and remembers your chat, and a security cookie that protects forms from forgery. We do not use advertising or analytics cookies. Because these cookies are essential, no cookie banner is needed. If we ever add optional cookies we will ask for your consent first and update this page.
9. Your rights
Under UK data protection law you have the right to:
- be told how your information is used, and to access a copy of it;
- have inaccurate information corrected, and incomplete information completed;
- have your information erased in certain circumstances;
- restrict or object to some uses, including direct marketing, which you can stop at any time with the unsubscribe link or by contacting us;
- receive your information in a portable format where applicable;
- withdraw consent at any time, without affecting what we did before; and
- not to be subject to solely automated decisions with legal or similarly significant effects.
To use these rights, contact us via the contact us form. We will reply within one month. We may need to check your identity first.
If you are not happy with how we handle your information you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint or on 0303 123 1113. We would appreciate the chance to put things right first.
10. Keeping your information safe
We protect your information with measures including encrypted connections, access controls, private cloud storage for photos accessed only through short-lived signed links, one-time sign-in codes, rate-limiting and monitoring. No online service can be completely secure, so please also protect your email account.
11. Children
The Service is for people aged 18 and over. We do not knowingly collect information from children. If you think a child has given us information, please contact us and we will delete it.
12. Changes to this policy
We may update this policy as the Service or the law changes. The date at the top of this page shows the latest version. If a change is significant we will tell you directly.
13. Contact us
You can contact us via the contact us form