Privacy Policy — ConnectLettings & ConnectListing

Last updated: 14 October 2026 (Version 1.2)

This policy explains how Connect Lettings Limited ("we", "us") handles personal data when you use the ConnectLettings mobile apps, connectlettings.com, and connectlisting.co.uk (together, the "Service"). We are registered in England and Wales (company number 16835736, registered office 5 Whitley Wood Road, Reading RG2 8HX, United Kingdom) and with the Information Commissioner's Office (registration ZC049602).

1. Who is responsible for your data

We are the controller for the personal data described in this policy — account data, and data processed to operate the Service.

Landlords are separately responsible (as controllers) for personal data they collect about tenants, applicants, and guarantors using the Service — for example the details a landlord enters when requesting a reference, documents a landlord requests, or notes a landlord records. If you are a tenant or applicant and have questions about why a landlord collected your data, contact the landlord; we will assist where required.

If someone else gave us your details. Much of the Service is used by one person about another: a landlord enters a tenant's, applicant's, guarantor's, co-landlord's or contractor's name and contact details; a tenant names their landlord; an enquirer's details reach us from a portal. If that is how we hold your details, the source is that person (or portal), the categories are those in §2, and everything in this policy — including your rights in §7 — applies to you whether or not you have an account. The first email we send you says who asked us to contact you.

Right to Rent is a statutory duty on the landlord, not on us. The landlord decides which documents to check, makes the check, and is responsible for holding the compliance copy for the period the Home Office requires. Our role is limited to providing a secure route for those documents to be transmitted and stored within the Service; we do not carry out, verify, or advise on the check. A landlord should keep their own copy outside the Service as well.

2. Data we collect

3. Why we use it (lawful bases)

• To provide the Service (contract): accounts, listings, syndication to portals, delivering enquiries to landlords, referencing transmission, documents, inventories, maintenance, notifications, payments.
• Legal obligations: tax and accounting records; responding to lawful requests; retention obligations described in §6.
• Legitimate interests: keeping a reliable record of what each party did and when (the purpose of a shared tenancy record); establishing, exercising or defending legal claims, including keeping evidence that a user accepted our terms and of what the Service showed and recorded; securing and improving the Service; preventing fraud and abuse; crash diagnostics and aggregate analytics; enforcing our terms; direct communication about service matters. We balance these against your rights.
• Consent, where we ask for it. Today that is the waiting list on our website and the optional household tick box on a repair report (§3, Sensitive information). We send no marketing; if that changes we will ask first. You can withdraw consent at any time.

Sensitive information. We do not ask for criminal-offence data, and we ask for information about health in one place only: when a tenant reports a repair they may, if they wish, tick a box saying that a child, someone over 65, someone pregnant, or someone with asthma or a lung condition lives in the home. It is optional, it exists so that a hazard in a vulnerable household is prioritised, and it is shown to the landlord with the repair. Identity and Right to Rent documents (which can show nationality and immigration status) and referencing information (which can include county court judgments and insolvency) are handled as confidential. If you choose to include sensitive information in something you write or upload (for example mentioning a health condition in a repair report or a pet request), it is shared with the other party to the tenancy like the rest of that record, so include only what is needed.

Automated decisions. We do not make decisions about you that have a legal or similarly significant effect by automated means alone. Referencing results are produced by the referencing provider and the decision to let is made by the landlord. A tenant's rental score is an automated indication calculated from records in the Service; it is shown to the tenant and shared only if the tenant chooses to share it. AI features (§4) suggest or read information; a person decides what to do with it.

We do not sell personal data. We do not use your data for third-party advertising.

4. Who we share it with

• Your counterpart in a tenancy — the Service exists to share tenancy information between landlord and tenant (e.g. inventories, maintenance reports, documents, journey progress). On a joint tenancy, the tenants can see each other's names and that a co-tenant has completed a shared step, and emails about the tenancy may be sent to all tenants with the landlord copied.
• People a landlord chooses to send things to — for example a contractor sent the details and photographs of a repair, or a co-landlord or guarantor sent a document to sign.
• Portals — listing content is published to portals you choose (e.g. Zoopla) and on ConnectListing.co.uk; enquiry details you submit on a portal are delivered to the relevant landlord.
• Service providers. Most act as our processors, on our instructions; some — in particular the payment processor, the referencing provider, the portals and the sign-in providers — are controllers in their own right for what they do with the data, and their own privacy notices apply. They are: Apple and Google (if you use their sign-in), Vercel (hosting of our websites, which processes IP addresses and request logs; it also counts visits to our websites — pages viewed, the referring site, the country and the type of device — without cookies and without storing anything on your device), Google Analytics (our websites only, with its advertising features switched off; it uses cookies only if you accept them, and otherwise receives cookie-free visit information; it also records how quickly our pages load), Google Maps (a property's address, to show its location), Google Firebase and Google Cloud (hosting, database, storage, authentication, notifications, usage statistics, crash reporting and app performance monitoring; copies of usage statistics, crash reports and notification-delivery records are kept in Google BigQuery in London, for analysis, for no longer than the retention period in section 6), Stripe (payments), Let's Safe (tenant referencing, at your/your landlord's request), Resend (transactional email), DocuSeal (electronic signatures, where a landlord chooses certified signing — it receives the document being signed and each signer’s name and email address, and records the signing audit trail including time and IP address; hosted in the EU), Mapbox (address search and geocoding), the postcodes.io and Energy Performance of Buildings Register lookups (a property’s postcode only, to find its council and its energy certificate), and AI processing providers — currently Google (Gemini) — used for optional features (the in-app assistant "Letti", document data extraction, and listing description generation); AI requests are routed through our own servers, and your messages to the assistant are not used to train the provider's models. Each is bound by contract to protect your data.
• Professional advisers, authorities, or successors where required by law, to protect rights, or in a business transfer.

5. International transfers

Our providers may process data outside the UK (including the US and EU). Where they do, transfers are protected by UK adequacy regulations or approved safeguards. Where providers process data in the US, transfers rely on the UK Extension to the EU–US Data Privacy Framework or the UK International Data Transfer Addendum (IDTA) to the Standard Contractual Clauses.

6. How long we keep it

• Account data: while your account is active, then permanently deleted or anonymised within 30 days of account deletion, except as required below.
• Tenancy and financial records: retained for up to 6 years after the relevant tenancy or transaction ends, reflecting tax, deposit-scheme, and legal-claim limitation requirements under UK law.
• Right to Rent records: retained for the duration of the tenancy plus 12 months, in compliance with Home Office statutory record-keeping requirements.
• Referencing data: retained per the 6-year tenancy rule where a tenancy proceeds; otherwise deleted or anonymised within 12 months, to account for potential Equality Act 2010 limitation periods.
• Portal enquiries: deleted or anonymised within 12 months if not progressed into a tenancy.
• Letti assistant conversations and answer feedback: retained for up to 12 months for support, safety, and service improvement, then automatically deleted. Deleted immediately when your account is deleted. You can view your own conversation history on request via a subject access request.
• Invoices and payment records: retained for 6 years from the end of the financial year they relate to, as company and tax law requires. These are kept even after an account is deleted.
• Inventories, photographs, signed agreements and signing certificates: retained for 6 years after the tenancy ends, because they are the evidence relied on in a deposit or possession dispute.
• Repair records and the messages on them, and messages between landlord and tenant: retained for 6 years after the tenancy ends.
• Support cases: retained for 2 years after the case is closed.
• Waiting-list sign-ups: deleted within 12 months, or when you register.
• In-app notifications: deleted within 12 months.
• Administrative audit records (for example a price change or an account suspension): retained for 6 years.
• Crash and analytics data: retained for up to 14 months. App usage statistics record which features are used, together with your role (landlord or tenant) and an app-installation identifier that Google Firebase generates for the copy of the app on your device. They do not carry your account identifier, your name, your email address or the content of your records, and they are never used for advertising. You can switch them off at any time under Profile → Privacy & Legal → Share usage statistics; they are on by default. App performance data (Google Firebase Performance Monitoring) records how long the app takes to start and to show its screens and how long its requests to our servers take, together with the device model, operating system and app version; it carries no account identifier and none of your records, and the same switch turns it off. Crash reports are separate: they stay on, because their only purpose is to let us find and fix faults. Website analytics carry no account identifier.
• Backups: overwritten within 35 days, so that a deletion takes full effect.
• Record of your agreement to our terms (the version accepted and when): retained for 6 years after your account is closed, as evidence of the contract between us. Kept even after an account is deleted.
• Email opt-outs and suppressions: kept for as long as needed to make sure we do not email an address that has asked us not to.

A live tenancy, an open deposit dispute, arrears, a possession claim, or a complaint or legal claim involving us pauses the relevant period until it is closed.

Where deletion is requested but a legal retention obligation applies, we remove what we can and retain only what the obligation requires. At the end of a retention period we strip the personal details from a tenancy record rather than delete it: names, email addresses and phone numbers are replaced with "[erased]", and the property address, dates and figures are kept, because the other party to the tenancy still needs an intact rent and tax history. A record reduced in that way may still be linked to a person through the address and dates, so we go on treating it as personal data (it is pseudonymised, not anonymous) and your rights in §7 continue to apply to it.

7. Your rights

You have the right to access, correct, delete, restrict, or object to our processing of your data, to data portability, to withdraw consent, and not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing that significantly affects you. These rights apply whether or not you have an account (see §1). A tenancy record is shared: where you ask us to delete something the other party to the tenancy is entitled to keep, we will remove your access and personal details where we can without destroying their record. To exercise them: Profile → Delete my account (deletion) or email support@connectlettings.com. We respond within one month. Deletion is subject to the retention rules in §6 — we will tell you if anything must be retained and why.

Complaints about how we handle your data. Email support@connectlettings.com with "Data protection complaint" in the subject. We acknowledge a complaint within 30 days and respond without undue delay, telling you the outcome. You can also complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk, 0303 123 1113) at any time; we'd appreciate the chance to resolve concerns first.

8. Security

Data is stored in Google Firebase with per-user access rules, encrypted in transit and at rest. Access to production systems is restricted. No system is perfectly secure; if a breach affecting your rights occurs we will notify you and the ICO as required.

9. Children

The Service is for users aged 18+. We do not knowingly collect data from children.

10. Changes

We will post changes here and, for material changes, notify you in-app or by email.

Contact: Connect Lettings Limited, 5 Whitley Wood Road, Reading RG2 8HX, United Kingdom · support@connectlettings.com