Privacy policy

Who we are

Lintel Homes Ltd is the data controller for the personal data described in this policy. We are registered with the Information Commissioner's Office under registration ZC218683, and we are a registered Scottish letting agent (LARN2610004).

You can contact us about anything in this policy at hello@lintelhomes.co.uk or by writing to 93 George Street, Edinburgh EH2 3ES.

What we collect

• Contact details: name, email address, phone number and postal address.
• Enquiry details: the property you asked about and anything you told us in your message.
• Buying a home: if you ask for a home's Home Report or register as a buyer, your name, contact details and buying position, and the kind of home and area you are looking for.
• Tenancy application data: proof of identity, proof of income, employment details, previous landlord references and credit reference results.
• Guarantor details, where a guarantor is provided.
• Landlord data: property addresses, landlord registration numbers, bank details for rent payments, and safety certification.
• Website analytics: which pages were opened and which of the site's tools were used, kept without your name or your contact details.
• Advertising measurement: the fact that a visit followed one of our adverts on Google, Facebook or Instagram, and whether it ended in an enquiry. Only if you accept the cookies we ask about, and never tied to your name or your enquiry.

Why we use it, and our lawful basis

We rely on different lawful bases depending on what we are doing:

• Performance of a contract: managing your tenancy or your property, collecting rent, arranging repairs.
• Legal obligation: landlord and letting agent registration, tenancy deposit protection, anti-money-laundering checks, and providing rent data to a local authority when required under the Housing (Scotland) Act 2025.
• Legitimate interests: responding to your enquiry, referencing prospective tenants, preventing fraud, understanding how our website is used, and emailing people who have enquired about our services our occasional updates (the soft opt-in under the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations, regulation 22(3)). We balance these against your rights and you can object at any time.
• Consent: where you have asked us to contact you about a valuation, to alert you to new properties, or where you signed up for our updates on the site. You can withdraw consent at any time.

Updates by email

When you enquire about our services, whether on a form, by phone, through a property portal or by booking a viewing, we add your email address to our updates list unless you tick the box asking us not to. The updates are occasional: law changes, market notes, and what they mean for your property or your search. This is the soft opt-in that the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations allow where you have enquired about a service and were given a simple way to refuse when we collected your address.

You can also sign up on the site, in which case we send a confirmation email and add you only when you confirm from it.

For this we store your email address, your name if you gave it, when and how your address reached the list, and the exact wording you were shown. Delivery runs through Resend, our email provider, acting as our processor.

Every update carries a one-click unsubscribe link. When you use it, or ask us directly, we stop sending and keep your address on a do-not-email record so we cannot add you back by mistake. Only a fresh confirmation from your own inbox can re-subscribe you.

Who we share it with

We share personal data only where we need to, and only with organisations bound to protect it:

• Landlords: where you apply for their property, so they can decide on your application.
• Referencing and credit reference agencies.
• Tenancy deposit schemes: SafeDeposits Scotland, Letting Protection Service Scotland or mydeposits Scotland.
• Contractors: limited to the details needed to carry out a repair, and, for a trade who applies to join our panel, the trade, coverage, scheme registrations and insurance position they give us.
• An automated document reader, run for us by Anthropic as our processor, which takes the dates and reference numbers off the insurance certificates and scheme cards that trades on our panel send us. A member of staff checks what it read before anything is recorded.
• Local authorities and the Scottish Government, where the law requires it.
• Our professional advisers, insurers and IT service providers.

We do not sell your personal data, and we do not pass it to third parties for their own marketing.

How long we keep it

• Unsuccessful enquiries and applications: 12 months. Emails and call records between you and us are kept against your record for the same period as the record itself, so that whoever picks up your enquiry can see what has already been said.
• Buyers register: while you are looking. Tell us when you have bought or stopped looking, or ask at any time, and we take you off it.
• Tenancy records: 6 years after the tenancy ends, in line with HMRC record-keeping requirements and covering the 5-year prescriptive period for contractual claims in Scotland.
• Landlord management records: 6 years after the management agreement ends.
• Anti-money-laundering records: 5 years from the end of the business relationship.
• Accounting records: 6 years, as required by HMRC.
• Updates list: until you unsubscribe. After that we keep only what is needed for the do-not-email record and the evidence of how your address reached the list.

Your rights

Under UK GDPR you have the right to access the personal data we hold about you, to have inaccurate data corrected, to have data erased where we no longer need it, to restrict or object to our processing, and to receive your data in a portable format.

To exercise any of these rights, email hello@lintelhomes.co.uk. We respond within one month. If you are unhappy with how we have handled your data you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk or on 0303 123 1113.

Cookies and analytics

The only cookies we set without asking are the ones the site needs to work: they hold your place in a form and keep the staff area secure. They build no profile and are not shared with anyone.

We measure how the site is used with analytics that set no cookies and store nothing at all on your device, so there is nothing there for you to permit and we do not ask. There is no cross-site tracking and no identifier that follows you from one day to the next.

Part of that is our own record, kept in our own database: which pages were opened and how far down they were read, whether an instant figure, a calculator or the property search was used, whether a form was begun, how far through it you got and which of its fields would not accept an answer (the name of the field, never what you typed in it), and whether a phone, WhatsApp or email link, a link to another site, or a link to one of our fee sheets or our landlord’s guide, was pressed. To tell one visit from another we make a code from your IP address and your browser's description, scrambled with a key that we delete every day. The IP address itself is not kept, the code cannot be turned back into it, and the same person the next day is a different code.

There is one thing we do ask about. We advertise on Google, and on Facebook and Instagram through Meta. If you accept, each of them sets a single cookie that lets it tell us which of our adverts led to an enquiry, and Meta may also use the fact that you visited to show you our adverts on Facebook and Instagram. If you say no, or simply ignore the question, no such cookie is set: Google works our results out from totals instead, and Meta hears nothing from us at all. The site behaves identically either way, and in neither case do we sell or share your data.

Loading Google's tag at all tells Google the address of the page you are on and your IP address, in the same way that loading any page tells the server serving it. That happens whichever answer you give, and it is why, for Google, the answer only governs the cookie. Meta's pixel is different: it is not loaded at all unless you accept, so if you say no, Meta learns nothing about your visit.

You can change your mind whenever you like. Cookie choices, at the foot of any page, reopens the question, and answering again replaces your previous answer immediately. We record which wording you agreed to alongside the date, so that if we ever change what we are asking for, we ask again rather than carrying an old yes forward.

Alongside page views we count a valuation figure being shown, a valuation being requested, a sales appraisal being requested, an enquiry being sent, and the uses of the site described above. No name, email address, phone number, address or full postcode is ever attached to them. A sum on a calculator is kept as a price band and not as the figure you typed, and the most precise location recorded is the first half of a postcode, which describes a local market rather than a household. Our own record is deleted after two years.

If you send us an enquiry through the site, we keep that day's visit with it: the pages you opened, the tools you used and how the form went before you sent it. The person who answers you can then see what you have already read, and we learn which pages are useful. It is the one place our record of a visit meets a name. It covers that day alone, it is used for nothing else, and it is deleted with the rest of the record after two years.

If we ever add anything else that stores data on your device or that could identify you individually, we will ask you first, default it to off, and update this policy before it goes anywhere near the site.

Security

We hold personal data on access-controlled systems, encrypt it in transit, and limit access to staff who need it. Client money is held in a separate client account protected by Propertymark Client Money Protection.