Estate Agents Click Here
Find property in Northern Ireland
Home
Property For Sale Property For Rent Land & Sites Commercial Overseas Property News EPC

Privacy Policy

Last updated: 29th January 2008

1. Who Are We?

We are Property Pal. We are privately owned and based in Northern Ireland. Our office address is Property Pal, 29 Main Street, Randalstown, ANTRIM, Co. Antrim, BT41 3AB.  We are registering with the Information Commissioner in accordance with the Data Protection Act 1998, Data Protection Registration no. PENDING.
Any personal information provided to or gathered by Property Pal is controlled by Property Pal. Our trading names are EstateMate.com and Estate Mate.
You can contact us by visiting our Contact Us page and find out a bit more about the company by visiting About Us.

2. Information We Need

The information we learn from our customers helps us personalise and continually improve your shopping experience on this website. We use the information to handle orders, deliver products and services, process payments, communicate with you about orders, products, services and promotional offers, update our records and generally maintain your accounts with us, display content such as wishlists and recommend merchandise and services that might be of interest to you. We also use this information to improve our store and platform, prevent or detect fraud or abuses of our website and enable third parties to carry out technical, logistical or other functions on our behalf.
We will never collect sensitive information about you without your explicit consent. If we intend to transfer your information outside the EEA (European Economic Area) we will always obtain your consent first. The information we hold will be accurate and up to date. You can check the information that we hold about you by emailing us at support@propertypal.com. If you find any inaccuracies we will delete or correct it promptly.
Property Pal is committed to protecting your privacy and security. We will ensure that any information we obtain and use will always be held, used and transferred in compliance with all applicable data protection rules.
We do collate statistics about site traffic, sales and other commercial information which we pass on to trusted third parties to assist us in improving the service we provide to you. However, none of this information will identify individuals.
Information is kept securely in accordance with our internal security policy and may be used to:

  • 1. Process and deliver your Order;
  • 2. Provide Customer Support services to you;
  • 3. Provide you with an up to date, efficient, and reliable service;
  • 4. Help prevent fraud (eg. we may check credit card details with our credit agency and reserve the right to refuse Orders on that basis. Your credit rating can be checked for a nominal fee with the main UK agencies Equifax and Experian);
  • 5. Open and run your Estate Mate customer account;
  • 6. Provide a more personal shopping experience.

By making an Order and/or submitting your data to us you agree to this use.

3. Accounts & Passwords

Your account contains your delivery and billing details, email preferences and a record of your orders. You will need your email address and password to see or edit your personal details. Please note that we do not store your credit card details online.

4. Information We Gather

Here are the types of information we gather.
Information You Give Us: we receive and store any information you enter on our website or give us in any other way. You can choose not to provide certain information but then you might not be able to take advantage of many of our features. We use the information that you provide for such purposes as responding to your requests, customising future shopping for you, improving our stores, and communicating with you.
Automatic Information: we receive and store certain types of information whenever you interact with us. For example, like many websites, we use "cookies" and we obtain certain types of information when your web browser accesses this website. A number of companies offer utilities designed to help you visit websites anonymously. Although we will not be able to provide you with a personalised experience at this website if we cannot recognise you, we want you to be aware that these tools exist.
Email Communications: to help us make emails more useful and interesting, we often receive a confirmation when you open email from Estate Mate if your computer supports such capabilities. If you do not want to receive email or other mail from us, please adjust your email preferences in “My Page”.

5. Security of Personal Information

When you enter credit card information to this website our secure servers ensure that all details are encrypted at your browser before they are sent to us. During the order process we store your personal details on secure servers. We store credit card details separately on servers that are not reachable from the internet.

6. Security Checks

As part of our policy to protect against the fraudulent use of credit cards, we carry out random security checks on orders. These can take various forms, and may involve contacting you by telephone before your order is processed.
From time to time it may be necessary for us to ask you to provide a copy of a recent statement header for the card being used on your order. Please note that we are only interested in confirming information already provided on your order, i.e. the billing name and address and card issuer details, and do not need to see actual transactions, which can be covered up. In case you have any concerns regarding security, we can assure you that all information is shredded as soon as we have confirmed the details required.
We hope you appreciate that these measures are a necessary precaution, undertaken in the interests of fraud prevention.

7. Who Else May See Your Information

Property Pal may, if required, pass on the details of your order to UK Customs & Excise.

8. Data Controllers

The Data Protection Act 1998 requires us, as registered Data Controllers, to be open about our holding and use of personal data. It also entitles individuals to find out from us what personal data is held about them on computer, to have that information corrected or erased if it is inaccurate, and to claim compensation if they can prove they have suffered damage from an inaccuracy or breach of security. Property Pal is committed to upholding the eight Data Protection Principles of good information handling practice.

9. The Data Protection Principles

As Registered data controllers, we must comply with the Data Protection Principles in relation to the personal data we hold. Broadly they state that personal data shall:

  • 1. Be obtained and processed fairly and lawfully.
  • 2. Be processed only for limited purposes which are described in the register entry.
  • 3. Be adequate, relevant and not excessive in relation to the purpose for which they are held.
  • 4. Be accurate and, where necessary, kept up to date.
  • 5. Be held no longer than is necessary for the purpose for which they are held.
  • 6. Be processed in accordance with the data subjects' rights.
  • 7. Be surrounded by proper security.
  • 8. Not be transferred to countries outside the EEA without adequate protection.

For further details about the Data Protection Act, please contact The Information Commissioner: http://www.ico.gov.uk/

10. Cookies

Cookies are a technology that can be used to provide you with tailored information from a website. A cookie is an element of data that a website can send to your browser, which may then store it on your system. You can set your browser to notify you when you receive a cookie, giving you the chance to decide whether to accept it.
Our site makes use of cookies. Cookies are used for the following purposes:

  • Completing the user's current activity
  • Website administration
  • Research and development

This website uses cookies as part of the mechanism to hold the contents of the shopping basket during each visit that you make to the site, and as such we recommend that both permanent and session cookies be enabled.
There is no requirement to have 3rd party cookies enabled for our site to work, however we may occasionally carry out market research, which a third party may assist with, during which they may issue a cookie from our site. Some of our carefully selected affiliate partners may also issue cookies so that they can track sales at this website through them. If 3rd party cookies are not accepted it does not affect the functionality of our site.

11. How secure is Information About Me?

We work to protect the security of your information during transmission by using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) software, which encrypts information you input.
We reveal only the last five digits of your credit card numbers when confirming an order. Of course, we transmit the entire credit card number to the appropriate credit card company during order processing.
We maintain physical, electronic and procedural safeguards in connection with the collection, storage and disclosure of personally identifiable customer information. Our security procedures mean that we may occasionally request proof of identity before we disclose personal information to you.
It is important for you to protect against unauthorised access to your password and to your computer. Be sure to sign off when you finish using a shared computer.

12. What Information Can I Access

Property Pal gives you access to a broad range of information about your account and your interactions with this website for the limited purpose of viewing and, in certain cases, updating that information.

13. Conditions of Use, Notices & Revisions

If you choose to visit this website, your visit and any dispute over privacy is subject to this Privacy & Security Policy and our Terms and Conditions of Use & Sale, including limitations on damages and application of the laws of Northern Ireland . If you have any concern about privacy at this website, please email us a thorough description and we will try to resolve the issue for you.
Our business changes constantly and our Privacy & Security Policy and the Terms and Conditions of Use & Sale will change also. We may email periodic reminders of our notices and conditions, unless you have instructed us not to, but you should check our website frequently to see recent changes. Unless stated otherwise, our current Privacy & Security Policy applies to all information that we have about you and your account. We stand behind the promises we make, however, and will never materially change our policies and practices to make them less protective of customer information collected in the past without the consent of affected customers.

14. Examples of Information Collected

Information You Give Us
You provide most such information when you search, buy, bid, post, participate in a contest or questionnaire or communicate with customer service. For example, you provide information when you: search for a property; save a search; place an order through this website; provide information in “My Page”  (and you might have more than one if you have used more than one email address when using our website) or your My Account area (if you are a developer or estate agent); communicate with us by phone, email or otherwise; complete a questionnaire; and employ other personal notification services such as new properties added notifications. As a result of those actions, you might supply us with such information as: your name; address and phone number; credit card information; content of emails to us; the personal description in your My Account/My Page area; and financial information.

Automatic Information
Examples of the information we collect and analyse include: the Internet protocol (IP) address used to connect your computer to the Internet; login; email address; password; computer and connection information such as browser type and version; operating system and platform; purchase history, which we sometimes aggregate with similar information from other customers to create features such as Top Sellers; the full Uniform Resource Locators (URL) clickstream to, through and from our website (including date and time); cookie number; properties you viewed or searched for; and any phone number used to call our customer service number. During some visits we may use software tools such as JavaScript to measure and collect session information, including 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.

Information from Other Sources
Examples of information we receive from other sources include: updated address and geo-coding information from other third parties, which we use to correct our records and position your properties on our site more easily; search term and search result information from some searches conducted through the web; and credit history information from credit bureaus, which we use to help prevent and detect fraud and to offer certain credit or financial services to some customers.

15. Information You Can Access

Examples of information you can access easily at Property Pal include: up-to-date information regarding recent orders; personally identifiable information (including name, email, password, communications preferences, address book); payment settings (message balances, payments received, payments due and payments owed); email notification settings; sms notification settings; recommendations (including recent product-view history, prior-order history and favourites); saved searches, seller accounts and your My Account/My Page area including your personal profile.

16. Dispute Resolution

In case of any dispute, please email Customer Services at support@propertypal.com or call us on one of the above telephone numbers listed in Contact Us.
If this does not address your concerns, please email Estate Mate’s owner at owner@propertypal.com

17. Opting IN & Opting OUT

Property Pal offers visitors and customers opportunities to receive ad hoc emails, regular emails and catalogues from Property Pal. Some of these are opt-in, others are opt-out. Each opportunity will explicitly state whether it is opt-in or opt-out. You may opt out of the various uses of your personal information at any time, even if you have previously given your consent for us to use them
If you would like further details of the lists you are signed up to, would like to change your preferences or simply want further information, please email Customer Services at support@propertypal.com
Property Pal will never share or sell your information to any 3rd parties.