What we keep after you email, and for how long

01

What it is used for

To reply to you, and to go and look at the house you mentioned. That is the only reason the mailbox exists. Your message is read by the people who do the walking at GARIB PROPERTY LIMITED and by nobody else.

It is not added to a mailing list, because there is no mailing list. It is not sold, rented or handed to anybody for marketing, and it is not used to build a profile of you. It is passed outside the company in exactly three situations: to the solicitors acting on a purchase or sale that your message is part of; to our accountant where a message forms part of the paperwork for a transaction; and where a court, a regulator or the law requires it. Our email is hosted by a third-party mail provider, which means the message sits on that provider's servers in the ordinary way, in the same way that your own mail sits on yours.

02

How long it stays, and when it is deleted

An enquiry that comes to nothing

Kept while the conversation is live and for twelve months after the last message, then deleted from the mailbox.

An enquiry about a house we go on to walk

Kept for twenty-four months after the last message, because a house looked at once is often looked at again.

Correspondence that becomes part of a completed purchase or sale

Kept for six years from completion. That is the ordinary limitation period for a contract claim in England and Wales, and it is the reason the period is that long rather than a preference of ours.

Anything a tax rule requires us to hold

Kept for as long as that rule says, and no longer.

Deletion means deletion from the mailbox and from any copy on a work machine. Backups taken by our mail provider age out on that provider's own cycle, which is not something we control and would be dishonest to promise around.

03

What this website does inside your browser

It sets no cookies. It stores nothing in local storage. There is no analytics, no tag manager, no pixel, no advertising script, no social widget, no chat bubble, no embedded map and no video player. The measuring tool on the walk-through page does its arithmetic in your browser and sends nothing anywhere; close the tab and the numbers are gone.

One honest exception: the typefaces are requested from Google Fonts, so loading a page makes one request to that service, and Google therefore sees that request and the internet address it came from. Nothing else on these pages is fetched from anybody else. The pages themselves are served as static files.

04

Asking for a copy, a correction or a deletion

Write to the same address and say which you want. You can ask what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete it, or object to our holding it at all, and we will answer within one month. Asking for deletion of a thread we are in the middle of will usually end the conversation, which is sometimes exactly what is wanted.

The lawful basis for keeping an enquiry is our legitimate interest in answering it and in buying and selling property; for the six-year period above it is our legal obligation and the defence of legal claims. If a data question is not dealt with properly, a complaint can be made to the Information Commissioner's Office, which supervises data protection in the United Kingdom.