Privacy Policy

PRIVACY STATEMENT

Introduction

(“Site”). We respect the privacy of each user of the Site (referred to as “you” or “a user”), whether you are just beginning your real estate search or have previously visited our Site. This Privacy Statement gives you specific information about how we protect your privacy, how we treat information we collect on the Site that identifies an individual user (“Personal Information”), and how we use aggregated information.

BY REGISTERING FOR OR USING THE SITE, YOU SIGNIFY YOUR ACCEPTANCE OF THIS PRIVACY STATEMENT. IF YOU DO NOT AGREE TO THIS PRIVACY STATEMENT, YOU CANNOT USE THE SITE. We reserve the right to modify this Statement at any time by posting a notice on the Site’s home page. (If we consider it appropriate, we may also provide additional notice of significant changes.) Your use of the Site after the date of the last modification listed at the beginning of this Privacy Statement indicates to us that you agree to the changes.

Location of Servers and Transfer of Information to the United States

The Site is hosted by servers in the United States. If you are located outside of the United States, your Personal Information will be transferred to the United States. By submitting your Personal Information, you consent to its transfer to the United States and to its storage, processing, and use there in accordance with this Privacy Statement.

Scope of this Privacy Statement

This Privacy Statement applies to your use of this Site only. We do not own, operate or control the web sites of our Franchisees or sales associates. Accordingly, this Statement does not apply to a Franchisee’s or sales associate’s web site or to a Franchisee’s or sales associate’s collection, use, storage and disclosure of your Personal Information.

1. Collection and Use of Your Personal Information

We collect your Personal Information on the Site in order to enhance the services we offer you. We collect Personal Information from you only when you voluntarily submit it in order to obtain certain services or information, including (A) registrations for special communications, such as saving a search for you and, but only if you request it, sending you new listings that fit the profile of your saved search; (B) requests to find a property, to list your property, and to find a sales associate; (C) requests to contact us; (D) requests to receive periodic industry updates; (E) requests to email a listing to a friend; (F) applications for employment; and (G) inquiries about franchising opportunities.

Requests to Find or List a Property and to Find a Sales Associate

If you submit a request through this Site to find or list a property or to find a sales associate, you will be asked to provide Personal Information and we refer this information to Franchisees or sales associates to respond to your request. For example, if you ask that we list your property or if you ask to see more listings in a given area, you will be directed to a Franchisee in that area.

Contacting Us

If you contact us, we collect Personal Information, which is retained or referred to an independent Franchisee or sales associate depending on the nature of your inquiry. If you are looking for a property or a sales associate, it is referred to a Franchisee or sales associate; if your inquiry or complaint requires a response from us, it is referred to the appropriate department for research and a response. The information we collect is not used in any other way and is not retained after one year.

Refer a Listing to a Friend

If you choose to send a listing to a friend, you will be asked to provide the friend’s name and email address in order to personalize the email and to send the email. We do not store this information, and the information is used only to send the one-time referral email.

Employment Inquiry

If you are seeking employment, you will be asked to provide Personal Information about yourself. We refer this information to Franchisees in the geographic area in which you live.

2. Collection of Non-Personal Information

Even if you do not send us any Personal Information, we collect information about how you use our site (“Non-Personal Information”). This information cannot be used to identify you personally and is explained in more detail below under “Non-Personal Information”.

Cookies

A cookie is a small data file, often including an anonymous unique identifier, that is sent from a web site’s computer and stored on your computer’s hard drive. Use of cookies is common on the Internet. A web site can send its own cookie to your browser if your browser’s preferences allow it, but (to protect your privacy) your browser permits a web site to access only the cookies it has already sent to you, not the cookies sent to you by other sites.

You can configure your browser to accept all cookies, reject all cookies, or notify you when a cookie is sent. (Each browser is different, so check the “Help” menu of your browser to learn how to change your cookie preferences.) You can reset your browser to refuse all cookies or indicate when a cookie is being sent. But if you refuse cookies, some parts of the Site will not function properly and may not provide services or information you have requested. For example, without cookies, we will not be able to provide you with searches that you have asked us to save.

Non-Personal Information

Like many sites, we obtain Non-Personal Information such as IP (internet protocol) addresses, browser types, the name of your ISP (internet service provider), information about where a user comes from before arriving at our Site, what pages a user visits, the order of those pages, and the amount of time spent on each.

A vendor performs this service for us by sending a cookie to gather this information, compile it, and report to us. We use Non-Personal Information to customize the advertising and content you see, improve our services, conduct research, and provide anonymous aggregated reporting for internal audits and third-parties.

Advertising Networks

We send to your web browser some of the advertisements you see when you use our network of web sites. However, we also allow other companies, called third-party ad servers or ad networks, to serve advertisements within our web pages. Because your web browser must request these advertising banners from the ad network web site, these companies can send their own cookies to your cookie file, just as if you had requested a web page from the web site.

Please note that if an advertiser asks us to show an advertisement to a certain audience (for example, men ages 18-34) or audience segment (for example, men ages 18-24 who have viewed sports content) and you respond to that ad, the advertiser or ad-server may conclude that you fit the description of the audience they are trying to reach.

As always, remember we authorize our third-party ad servers to employ anonymous cookies only for ad delivery and anonymous targeting. Our third-party ad servers do not collect, nor do we give them access, to any Personal Information about you.

Opting Out of Third-Party Ad Servers

If you want to prevent a third-party ad server from sending and reading cookies on your computer, currently you must visit each ad network’s web site individually and opt out (if they offer this capability). Currently, we have relationships with the following third-party ad networks (click to visit their Web sites and review their privacy statements): 24/7 Real Media, Inc. 

3. Use of Information

We use the Personal Information and the Non-Personal Information we collect on the Site (A) to provide you with the services that you ask to receive through the Site, including saving searches and, if you request it, sending you updates about those searches; (B) to receive, if you choose, to receive periodic industry updates; (C) to answer your questions or complaints; (D) to refer you to Franchisees and sales associates about finding or listing a property or to locate a sale associate; (E) to refer a listing to a friend; and (F) inquiries about franchising opportunities. and (G) for analytical purposes to help us improve the Site and for our business generally.

We may also use the Personal Information to inform you about other services and products that may be available through us, our family of companies, our franchisees and/or companies with which we have a marketing relationship, and to provide you a customer survey to assess your satisfaction with our services and products. We may allow others to provide audient measurement and analytics services for us, to serve advertisements on our behalf, and to track and report on the performance of those advertisements.

These entities may use cookies, web beacons, SDKs, and other technologies to identify your device when you use the Site, as well as when you visit other online sites and services, and such services will be covered by the privacy policy of the respective third parties. We use Google Analytics and other such tracking mechanisms to collect information about the use of the Site.  More information on Google Analytics – including how you can control the information sent to Google – can be found here:  www.google.com/policies/privacy/partners/

4. Sharing Your Information

We reserve the right to share your Personal Information with our affiliated companies and marketing partners, as permitted by law, in order to fulfill our commitment of providing you with full service real estate brokerage services. We do share your Personal Information under the following circumstances:

A. Third party vendors we engage to provide services on our behalf, such as hosting, web-site development, and support, have access to Personal Information, but they have agreed not to disclose the Personal Information or to use it for any purpose other than providing the requested services.

B. There may arise special circumstances where it is necessary for us to disclose and use Personal Information and Non-Personal Information, such as: to enforce this Privacy Statement or any other part of our Terms & Conditions to protect our property or rights; to protect the safety of anyone; to investigate, prevent, or take action regarding illegal or improper activities; to carry out a merger or consolidation with another entity, a sale or transfer of some or all of our assets, or any similar transaction; or for other reasons we determine in good faith are necessary, appropriate, or required by law, such as when we respond to subpoenas, court orders, or other legal or administrative process.

The Site contains links to third-party web sites, including a mortgage company, our Franchisees, our advertisers, or banner advertising. If you hold your mouse over a link, it will indicate whether clicking the link will send you off our Site. When you click on those links, you will go to a third-party site where you will be subject to that site’s privacy statement and we encourage you to read that policy statement. Please be aware that we are not responsible for the privacy practices of those other web sites and we expressly disclaim any liability for their actions, including actions relating to the use and disclosure of Personal Information by those third parties. We remind you to be aware of when you leave our Site and enter a third-party web site, including one of our independent Franchisees, and again encourage you to read the privacy statement on any web site that collects your Personal Information.

5. Security

Our hosting services maintains its systems in accordance with reasonable industry standards to reasonably secure the information of its customers. However, no data transmission over the Internet can be guaranteed to be 100% secure. “Perfect security” does not exist on the Internet, and you use the Site at your own risk.

6. Correction/Updating Personal Information

If your Personal Information changes or if you no longer wish to use the Site, you may correct or update your Personal Information or unsubscribe from any industry updates you have requested by modifying or deleting your profile on the Site, writing to customer service at:

Our address:

7. Children

This Site is not directed to children under the age of 13 (“Children”), and we do not knowingly collect any information, including Personal Information, from Children.

8. California Privacy Rights

Under California law, California residents have the right to request in writing from businesses with whom they have an established business relationship (1) a list of categories of personal information, such as name, address, e-mail address, and the type of services provided to the customer, that a business has disclosed to third parties [including affiliates that are separate legal entities]during the immediately preceding calendar year for the third parties’ direct marketing purposes and (2) the names and addresses of all such third parties. To request the above information please contact us by writing to customer service at:

Our Address

We will respond to such requests within 30 days of receipt. Please note that we are only required to respond to each customer once per calendar year.

What personal data we collect and why I collect it

Comments

When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.

An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.

Media

If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website.

Contact forms

Cookies

If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year.

If you have an account and you log in to this site, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.

When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.

If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.

Embedded content from other websites

Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.

These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracing your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

How long we retain your data

If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.

For users that register on our website (if any), we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.

What rights you have over your data

If you have an account on this site, or have left comments, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.