Privacy Policy

Data Controller

Property-Compass Ltd (Company No. 16556969, ICO No. ZC109988), registered in England and Wales, operates the website www.propertycompass.co.uk ("Property Compass®" — a registered trade mark, UK00004373685).

For data protection enquiries, contact privacy@propertycompass.co.uk.

Data We Collect

When you create an account or use our services, we may collect:

Account data — email address, first name, last name (provided during registration via Auth0)
Profile data — company name, investment interests, bio, experience level (voluntarily provided)
Usage data — pages visited, features used, search queries, calculator inputs
Payment data — processed by Stripe; we do not store card numbers
Communications — messages sent via the contact form, direct messages between members, bug reports
Technical data — IP address, browser type, device information, session cookies, and, while you are signed in, a pseudonymous identifier on our server logs (a keyed hash of your account reference that shows neither your name nor your email address)

Lawful Basis

We process your data under:

Contract — to provide the services you have signed up for (account management, subscriptions, community features)
Legitimate interest: to improve the platform, prevent abuse, check free trial eligibility, and send service-related notifications
Consent — for marketing communications and non-essential cookies (managed via Cookiebot)

Free trial eligibility

The free trial of Full membership is for people who have not had one before. To check this, we use your account's membership history, your email address, and an identifier Stripe gives the card or bank account you add (a "fingerprint"). A fingerprint lets us recognise the same card on another account. It is not your card number, which we never receive or store, and it identifies a card rather than a person.

If your email address or payment method was already used for a free trial or Full membership, we offer you Full membership at the normal price instead of another free trial. We never charge you automatically because of this. If you think we've made a mistake, for example because you share a card with someone, choose Ask us to review or contact us, and a person will look at it.

We do this under our legitimate interests in offering fair introductory offers and preventing repeated free trials.

Third-Party Processors

We share data with the following processors, all of which maintain appropriate safeguards:

Processor	Purpose	Data Shared
Auth0 (Okta)	Authentication (email/password, Google sign-in)	Email, name, login events
Stripe	Subscription billing and payment processing	Email, payment details (card data held by Stripe only)
SendGrid (Twilio)	Transactional email delivery	Email address, notification content
Microsoft Azure (UK South)	Application hosting, database, and logs	All platform data (encrypted at rest)
Cloudflare R2	Image and file storage	Uploaded files
Backblaze B2	Encrypted off-site database backups	Database backups
Railway	Former hosting provider, being decommissioned	Data held there before we moved to Microsoft Azure
Sentry (EU)	Error monitoring	Technical data and error details, and recordings of page sessions where enabled
PostHog (EU)	Product analytics	Usage data and technical data, and recordings of page sessions where enabled
Ideal Postcodes	Address lookup	The postcode or address you search for
Cookiebot	Cookie consent management	Consent preferences, anonymised analytics
Mapbox	Map tiles for property search	Approximate location (postcode level)

Who Else Can See Your Data

Other members can see what you post on the Deal Board, Community Feed, and Forum, and your member profile
Coaches — when you book a consultation, the coach sees your name, your request, your note, and the booking time

Cookies

We use Cookiebot to manage cookie consent. Essential cookies are required for the site to function. Analytics and preference cookies require your consent. You can change your preferences at any time via the cookie banner. See our Cookie Policy for every cookie we set.

Under the UK General Data Protection Regulation and the Data Protection Act 2018, you have the right to:

Access your personal data
Rectify inaccurate data
Erase your data ("right to be forgotten")
Restrict processing in certain circumstances
Data portability — receive your data in a machine-readable format
Object to processing based on legitimate interest
Withdraw consent at any time for consent-based processing

To exercise any of these rights, email privacy@propertycompass.co.uk. We will respond within 30 days.

Download your data yourself. When you are signed in, select Download my data on your account page to get a copy of your personal data as a JSON file at once. The file covers your account details, member profile, investor profile, subscription, consent history, watchlist, saved searches, saved map searches, saved analyses, properties, and property notes. It doesn't include other data we hold, such as usage records, messages, community posts, and shared properties. To ask for anything the file leaves out, email privacy@propertycompass.co.uk.

If you are not satisfied with our response, you have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) at ico.org.uk.

Data Retention

Active accounts — data retained for the duration of membership
Deleted accounts: personal data anonymised within 30 days; financial records retained for 7 years (HMRC requirement). If the account had a free trial or Full membership, we keep a limited eligibility record for 24 months after deletion, then delete it automatically. It holds only scrambled versions of your email address and payment method fingerprint, made with a secret key so they cannot be turned back into the originals, and the dates the trial was used and the account was deleted. It is not linked to any account and is used only to check free trial eligibility.
Bug reports and logs — retained for 90 days, then purged. This includes the pseudonymous identifier on server logs, which cannot be linked back to you without a secret key we hold, so deleting your account needs no separate step for it
Property research activity — when you look up property data (postcodes, area research, calculator inputs) we keep a per-call audit row (user ID, endpoint slug, postcode-bearing cache key, credit cost, timestamp) so we can answer billing questions, diagnose cache hot-spots, and meet our internal fair-use review obligations. These rows are purged automatically after 90 days by a scheduled retention job. Aggregate usage statistics (without postcodes) may be retained longer for trend analysis.
Account and admin activity record — when an administrator changes a member's account (for example their role, membership tier, suspension, or free trial), when accounts are merged or linked, and when you invite, remove, or accept a collaborator on a property or accept a coach invitation, we keep a record of who did it, what changed, and when. The record also holds the IP address and browser details of the request. We use it to investigate disputes, misuse, and security problems. Records are deleted automatically after 2 years, and the IP address and browser details are removed after 90 days. If you ask us to delete your account, we remove your IP address and browser details from the records of actions you took straight away, but keep the records themselves until they reach 2 years, because they show what happened to accounts we manage. Only our administrators can see these records. They aren't included in Download my data; to get a copy of the records about you, email privacy@propertycompass.co.uk.

International Transfers

Some processors may process data outside the UK. All transfers are protected by Standard Contractual Clauses or equivalent safeguards approved by the ICO.

Changes to This Policy

We may update this policy from time to time. Material changes will be notified via email or an in-app notification. The "last updated" date at the top of this page reflects the most recent revision.