Privacy Policy

Thank you for using Cordatus. Cordatus is split into two separate legal entitles, being Cordatus Real Estate Limited, a Company, registered in Scotland with company number SC419676 and having our registered office at Excel House, 30 Semple Street, Edinburgh, EH3 8BL and Cordatus Partners Limited, a Company registered in Scotland with company number SC30961 and having our registered office at Excel House, 30 Semple Street, Edinburgh, EH3 8BL. This privacy policy applies to all of these entities and for ease of reference, when we refer to “Cordatus”, we refer to the particular legal entity with whom you are engaging unless expressly stated to the contrary.

Your privacy is important to us. This Privacy Policy is where we explain to you what personal information is collected when you instruct us to provide you with services, how it is collected, how we may use that information, where we store it, how long we store it for, and how we protect it. We will also explain your rights in relation to your personal information.

This policy applies whether you are our client or not.

Please read the following carefully to understand our views and practices regarding your personal information and how we may collect it and treat it.

If you are using our website (www.cordatus-re.com), you will be referred to our Website Policy which explains more about how we may collect personal information about you via cookies (it also explains what cookies are) and our Retention Policy, which confirms how long we may hold onto your personal information.

If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact us at
info@cordatus-re.com

or, if you prefer to call or write to us, then you can find our contact details at the bottom of this policy.

This is page a summary of our full policy, which follows.

WHO WE ARE

We are CORDATUS REAL ESTATE LIMITED and CORDATUS PARTNERS LIMITED. We are registered in Scotland as companies with the registered numbers SC419676 and SC308961 respectively.

Our registered offices are at Excel House, 30 Semple Street, Edinburgh, EH3 8BL..
A list of all relevant members is open to inspection at our registered office.
But, for the purposes of this Privacy Policy, it’s just easier if we refer to ourselves as “we” or “us”.

WHAT THIS PRIVACY POLICY GOVERNS

This Privacy Policy applies to any services we are providing to you, any use of our websites, or any other services that we may provide to you (we’ll just call these “our services” for short).

In the context of this Privacy Policy “personal information” means information which, on its own or in combination with other information, can be used to identify you, in particular by reference to an identifier such as your name, your address, or location data. This Privacy Policy will govern how we may use that personal information.

We will collect, store and process your personal information the basis of one or more of four legal basis: your consent; legitimate interests; to perform a contract; or, as required by law.

Because we are a business located in Scotland the personal information that you give us or that we collect from you will be held under Scottish data protection legislation (but we’ll just refer to this as “the legislation”). The legislation requires that we tell you that we are a data controller for your personal information or, in other words, we determine the purposes for which and the manner in which any of your personal information are, or are to be, processed by us.

INFORMATION WE MAY COLLECT

We will collect the following information about you from various sources as follows:

Information you give to us:

You may give us personal information about you by filling in forms on our site or by corresponding with us by phone, e-mail or otherwise. This includes information you may provide to us when you register to use our sites, subscribe to our services, search our sites, participate in any discussion boards or other social media functions on our sites, and when you report a problem with our site.

The information you give us may include your name, address, e-mail address, phone number, IP address, personal description, CV or resume, and photograph (as the case may be).
Email

We operate a Microsoft Outlook system for our emails and any autocomplete details for your email will only be stored for the duration of the transaction for which we are instructed and a period of no more than 12 months after you last have contact with us. Autocompleted email addresses are reviewed annually and will be deleted if not used for at least 12 months. We have formed the view that we have a legitimate business need to hold such details, as it facilitates the provision of services to you.

IF YOU MAKE AN ENQUIRY BUT DON’T BECOME A CLIENT

Should you contact us and pass us personal data, but then decide not to proceed with a transaction or instruction, then we will still retain your data for a time. We often find that prospective clients who initially do not proceed later come back to instruct us on another transaction. For that reason, if you haven’t become one of our clients, and we haven’t been in touch for 12 months, then we would look to delete your contact details from our system.

HOW WE MAY USE YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION

Purpose /Activity Lawful basis for processing
Establishing and administering a client database, including making notes of calls, time recording, correspondence and preparing documents

 

(a)   Performance of a contract with you, by recording work done and connecting to internal documents

 

Internal record keeping (a)   Performance of a contract with you (in connection, in particular, with billing)

 

(b)   Required by law. Necessary to comply with a legal obligation (our professional rules require us to track time worked for a client)

(c)   Necessary for our legitimate interests (to keep our records updated and to study how customers use our products/services)

 

Undertaking checks with third parties (in particular, credit and ID checks) (a)   Performance of a contract with you

 

(b)   Required by law. Necessary to comply with a legal obligation (our professional rules require us to carry out certain checks on ID)

 

Exchange of internal information between our two group businesses (Cordatus Real Estate Limited and Cordatus Partners Limited) (a)   Performance of a contract with you (as we may need to involve sister businesses to provide all services you require)

 

(b)   Required by law.

 

(c)   Necessary for our legitimate interests (as the three businesses operate a joined approach to customer service)

 

Contacting any third parties, including lenders and other professional and solicitors working on a matter, who may represent other parties with interests contrary to yours, and providing correspondence and documentation prepared on your behalf

 

(a)   Performance of a contract with you (this is an intrinsic part of our work for you)
Prevention and detection of crime (and the prosecution of criminal activities) (a)   Performance of a contract with you

 

(b)   Required by law. Necessary to comply with a legal obligation. Legislation and professional rules place obligations upon us in respect of these matters.

(c)   Necessary for our legitimate interests (for running our business)

 

Progressing transactions (a)   Performance of a contract with you

 

Sending promotional e-mails which we think you may find interesting (only with your express consent) (a)   Performance of a contract with you

 

(b)   Necessary for our legitimate interests (to study how customers use our products/services, to develop them and grow our business)

 

Contacting you for market research purposes (a)   Performance of a contract with you

 

(b)   Necessary for our legitimate interests (to study how customers use our products/services, to develop them and grow our business)

 

Compliance with applicable laws and regulations (a)   Required by law. Necessary to comply with a legal obligation

 

Processing payment for the purchase of our products and/or services (a)   Performance of a contract with you

 

(b)   Necessary for our legitimate interests (to recover debts due to us)

 

Undertaking anti-money laundering, identity and credit checks (a)   Performance of a contract with you

 

(b)   Necessary for our legitimate interests (to study how customers use our products/services, to develop them and grow our business)

 

Providing information to agents or subcontractors so that they can assist us with providing the Website and/or the services (a)    Necessary for our legitimate interests (for running our business, provision of administration and IT services, network security, to prevent fraud and in the context of a business reorganisation or group restructuring exercise)

 

(b)   To perform a contract with you (where the contract relates to conveyancing and the agent or subcontractor is involved in lending or property listing services)

(c)   Necessary to comply with a legal obligation

 

Providing or receiving information from third parties providing ancillary services or support to services provided.  Such transfer will be on the basis that we have either a processing agreement in place or have reviewed the policies of such third party, and so we consider that there is adequate protection for your personal data. (a)   Necessary for our legitimate interests (for running our business, provision of administration and transaction support services, to prevent fraud, to reduce both our costs or group restructuring exercise)

 

(b)   To perform a contract with you (where the contract relates to other arrangements or services you have made with third parties, such as the listing of your property with an estate agent or arranging a mortgage with a lender)

(c)   Necessary to comply with a legal obligation

Each individual lawful basis outlined above is intended to be a single and sufficient justification for our processing of your relevant information.

We may carry out associated processing of your data where we believe we have a legitimate interest to do so, where required by law, to perform our services to you or fulfil a contract, and/or with your consent.

The policy goes into more detail about some of the processing we carry out.

MARKETING

We will not use your personal information for marketing purposes unless you have explicitly consented to being marketed to.

If you are receiving marketing communication in error then please get in touch with us and we apologise for any inconvenience caused.

DISCLOSURE OF YOUR INFORMATION

We may share your personal information with any member of our group, which means our subsidiaries, our ultimate holding company and its subsidiaries. The reason for this is that different parts of our business or group are responsible for different functions within our business and we need to be able to freely pass your personal information within these various business units.

Although we may share your personal information within members of our group, this does not mean that we will use it for direct advertising or marketing purposes. We will not contact you unless it is necessary for us to get in touch with you. For example, we may need to get in touch with you if we need to follow-up with you or if you asked us to provide you with further information about our services. We may contact you about services ancillary to a matter upon which we are instructed.

In some cases we may disclose your information with select third-parties, on the basis that such disclosure is needed to provide our services to you or to implement a contract between us or to fulfil our professional obligations or as required by law.

The third parties include:
• Credit reference agencies for the purpose of assessing your credit score where this is a condition of us entering into a contract with you
• Debt collection agencies where you have breached a condition of any contract entered between us and you.
• A purchaser of our assets, if substantially or all of our assets are acquired by a third party, in which case personal information held by us about you may be one of the transferred assets
• If we are under a duty to disclose or share your personal information in order to comply with any legal obligation, or in order to enforce our agreements with you, or to protect our rights, property, or safety of our customers, our employees, or others

WHERE WE STORE YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION

The personal information that we collect from you will be stored within the United Kingdom. We will not transfer your personal information outside of the European Economic Area. If we are using any software applications which are not based within the European Economic Area, we will seek separate and explicit consent from you before sharing any personal data or any sensitive personal data with that particular software supplier.

All personal information you provide to us is stored on our secure servers. Where practical and reasonable we will encrypt communication between our site and you. Where we have given you (or where you have chosen) a password which enables you to access certain parts of our site, you are responsible for keeping this password confidential. We ask you not to share a password with anyone.

Unfortunately, the transmission of information via the Internet is not completely secure. Although we will do our best to protect your personal information, we cannot guarantee the security of your data transmitted from our site and any transmission is at your own risk. Once we have received your personal information, we will use strict procedures and security features to try to prevent unauthorised access. In particular, note that we cannot encrypt your email address as it is required to allow messages to be sent to you.

YOUR RIGHTS 1: NOT TO PROCESS

You have the right to ask us not to process your personal information.

You can exercise your right at any time by contacting us. If you consented to us collecting and/or processing your personal information, but have changed your mind then you can get in touch with us about erasing the personal information we hold about you.

Please be aware that, even if we receive a request from you to delete your personal information, it may be that we cannot entirely remove all of your personal information. This is usually because we have a legitimate interest to hold onto some of that personal information, for example, if you have an ongoing contract with us or there are outstanding payments due by you to us or if we are obliged to maintain information by law or professional conduct rules – but we’ll let you know.

Deleting information may also mean we can no longer provide services to you.

YOUR RIGHTS 2: ACCESS TO INFORMATION AND OTHER RIGHTS

The legislation gives you the right to access a copy of the personal information that we hold about you.

In order to request a copy you need to submit a request to our Data Privacy Manager – details on how to get in touch can be found at the end of this Privacy Policy.

However, we can’t just release your personal information to anyone. We can only release your personal information to you – it’s a legal requirement. Therefore, it is important for us to ensure that we confirm your identity before we can release any personal information.

If you send us a request to provide you with a copy of your personal information then we may ask you to provide some identification. We may ask you to provide a copy of your current and valid passport and/or driving licence plus a utility bill (that is no more than 3 months old) and has your current address. We may also ask you to visit one of our offices or obtain a solicitors or notary publics’ confirmation of your identification.

All of this might sound very onerous but please understand that we have an obligation to protect your personal information and we need to be certain that it is being released to the right person.

You also have the right to ask us to rectify errors in any information we hold, to ask us to erase information we hold or to object to our processing of your information. (The law gives you an additional right to object to automated decision making about you, but we do not do that).

If you want to exercise these other rights we may ask for your ID in the same way as we would if you wanted to access information – we need to know the right person is asking.

WHAT IF I DO NOT CONSENT OR WITHDRAW CONSENT?

If you do not consent to us collecting your personal information then we cannot guarantee the full provision of services and cannot be held responsible or liable to you for any reduction or restriction in access to our other services.

HOW LONG WILL YOU HOLD ONTO MY PERSONAL INFORMATION?

Depending on how you engage with us or the types of services that we provide you it may be necessary for us to store your personal information for shorter or longer periods of time. HMRC recommend the retention of files for 6 years, so our policy is 6 years from the conclusion of the transaction. In most circumstances, we will keep your information for this period.

OTHER PERSONS’ INFORMATION

If you pass us information about another person, we may ask you to confirm that they have consented to us having that information. You should not give us information without the consent of its subject.

CHANGES TO OUR PRIVACY POLICY

We may need to change this Privacy Policy if it’s necessary for legal reasons or to reflect changes to our services. In any case, the provisions of this Privacy Policy may be changed without prejudice to your rights. When we change our Privacy Policy we will make the updated Privacy Policy available on our site and we will also update the “Last Updated” date.

Once we change our Privacy Policy, it will become legally binding on you 30 days after we post it on our site. During that period you’re welcome to contact us if you have questions about the changes.

CONTACT US

If you have any questions, comments or requests regarding our Privacy Policy then please do not hesitate to get in touch with us. To make things easier we would appreciate it if you your queries were addressed to our Data Privacy Manager:

Gavin Munn
Data Privacy Manager
Cordatus Real Estate Limited
26 Alva Street
Edinburgh
EH1 2BW

gmunn@cordatus-re.com
Telephone: +44 (0)131 240 1479