Privacy Policy
This Privacy Policy explains how RealTeasy (Pty) Ltd ("we", "us", "RealTeasy") collects, uses and protects your personal information, in accordance with the Protection of Personal Information Act, 2013 ("POPIA"). RealTeasy (Pty) Ltd (registration number 2025/873582/07, 3 Woodmere Street, Cape Town, South Africa) is the responsible party for the personal information described below. Our Information Officer is The Information Officer, reachable at hello@realteasy.co.za.
1. Information We Collect From You
- Account information, name, email address and password when you register (or your Google account's basic profile if you sign in with Google), and your marketing preferences.
- Your acceptance record, the version of these documents you accepted, when you accepted them, and the IP address you accepted them from. This is the evidence of the agreement between us.
- Listing & property information, listing URLs you paste for a Property Scan; and the address, property details, notes and photos you submit for a Home Value Estimate or a tracked property.
- Snap & Scan photographs and location, the photograph you take of a for-sale board and the coordinates captured with it. A Snap therefore records an image of a private property and where you were standing. Snap results are never link-shareable.
- Documents you upload, building plans, offers to purchase, rates or levy statements attached to an estimate. These are read by vision AI to extract property facts.
- Purchase history you volunteer, if you tell us what you paid for a property and when, we store it against your report and also use it, in anonymised and aggregated form, in suburb-level price statistics (see section 3).
- Portfolio & CRM data, properties you track, and any financials, leads and offers you record against them.
- Support chat, your conversations with the Guru assistant, and limited technical telemetry about those conversations.
- Payment metadata, subscription and payment records. Card and bank details are collected and processed by our payment provider (Stitch); we never receive or store them.
- Usage data, pages visited, reports generated, device and traffic-source information (only at the level your cookie consent allows), and push-notification tokens if you enable notifications.
- IP-derived fingerprints, a hashed combination of IP address and browser user agent, used only to enforce free-tier rate limits. This value cannot be reversed back into your IP address.
2. Information We Collect From Other Sources
To build reports and market statistics, we also process information that does not come from you:
- Public listing pages, the content of property listings you ask us to analyse, including the text, the stated facts, photographs, and the names of the agents published on those listings.
- Archived web pages, historical suburb statistics retrieved from public web archives (the Internet Archive), used to build suburb price history.
- Official statistics, published data such as Statistics South Africa's Residential Property Price Index, and suburb-level market statistics published by property portals.
This information is processed to produce property- and area-level analysis. We do not use it to build profiles of private individuals.
3. Purposes and Lawful Basis of Processing
We process your personal information to: create and manage your account; generate the reports you request; monitor listings you have scanned and properties you track (price-change alerts and re-estimates); enforce free-tier and subscription quotas; process payments; provide support (including the AI chat assistant); communicate with you about your account, reports and (where you have consented) marketing; detect and prevent abuse; and comply with our legal obligations.
Most of this processing is necessary to perform our contract with you: you asked for a report and we cannot produce one without processing what you submitted. Marketing is processed on the basis of your consent. Abuse prevention, security and the retention of records for tax and dispute purposes rest on our legitimate interests and our legal obligations.
Property-level observations from reports also feed anonymised, aggregated suburb statistics (for example average prices and growth rates); these aggregates contain no account-identifying information.
4. Estate Agents' Names on Public Listings
Public property listings name the marketing agent, and that name is part of the page we retrieve and analyse at your request. We process it on the basis of our legitimate interest in analysing the listing you asked about, and we do not use it to build a profile of, evaluate, rank or market to that agent.
If you are an agent and you object to this processing, you may object under section 11(3) of POPIA by emailing hello@realteasy.co.za. We will stop processing your name unless the law requires otherwise, and tell you what we did. The same address handles requests to correct or delete it.
5. Automated Decision-Making
A report is produced entirely automatically, with no human involvement in the figure. The estimate, the confidence range, the negotiation ladder and the investment verdict are all the output of software and AI models.
We tell you this because POPIA gives you rights where a decision is taken solely by automated means. A RealTeasy report is information for you to use, not a decision we make about you: it does not determine whether you get credit, a service, a price or anything else from us or from anyone else. If you believe a report about your own property is wrong, you can tell us at hello@realteasy.co.za, and a person will look at it and respond. You can also re-run a report with corrected details at any time.
6. AI Processing and Cross-Border Transfers
Generating a report or answering a support chat involves sending relevant content (listing details, property details, photos, uploaded documents and chat messages) to third-party artificial intelligence providers (such as OpenAI and Anthropic) and web-search providers, for the purpose of producing your report or response.
These providers process this content outside South Africa, including in the United States. We make those transfers under section 72 of POPIA, on the basis that the transfer is necessary for the performance of the contract between you and us: we cannot produce the report you asked for without them. The providers are bound by their own data processing terms and, where such a control is available to us, are contractually restricted from using our customers' content to train models.
Do not submit personal information about third parties (for example tenants) in notes, photos or documents beyond what is necessary for the report.
7. Third Parties That Process Data For Us
- AI & search providers, OpenAI and/or Anthropic (report and chat generation, photo and document reading); web-search providers used during market research.
- Stitch, payment processing (subscriptions, top-ups).
- Google, address autocomplete (Places), optional "Continue with Google" sign-in, and invisible reCAPTCHA on authentication pages.
- Email delivery providers, transactional and (if consented) marketing email.
- Firebase Cloud Messaging, web push notifications, if you enable them.
- Hosting and infrastructure providers, who store the data on our behalf.
- The Internet Archive, we retrieve archived public pages from it; we do not send it your personal information.
- Internal alerting, operational alerts (e.g. errors, support escalations) may surface limited context to our team via internal channels.
8. Marketing Consent
We only send you marketing emails (product tips, offers, win-back offers) if you have opted in via the marketing consent checkbox at registration or in your account settings. You can withdraw consent at any time from your account settings, or via the one-click unsubscribe link included in every marketing email.
9. Security
We serve the site over TLS, store passwords only as salted hashes, restrict access to production systems to authorised personnel, and hash the identifiers used for rate limiting rather than storing raw IP addresses for that purpose. We never receive card or bank details. No system is perfectly secure; if a breach affects your personal information we will notify you and the Information Regulator as POPIA requires.
10. Retention
We keep personal information only as long as its purpose requires:
- Account & portfolio data, For as long as your account is active, then deleted within 30 days of you deleting the account, apart from records we must keep for tax, company-law or dispute-resolution reasons. You can delete your account yourself from your profile page.
- Reports, Reports stay on your account until you delete them or close the account.
- Photos & documents, Photos and documents you upload for an estimate are kept with that report and deleted with it.
- Snap photographs & coordinates, Board photographs and their coordinates are kept with the snap and deleted with it, or when you close your account.
- Acceptance records, The record that you accepted these documents (version, timestamp and IP address) is kept for as long as your account exists and for 3 years afterwards, because it is the evidence of the agreement between us.
- Payment records, Retained for 5 years after the transaction to meet tax and company-law obligations.
- Support-chat telemetry, Support-chat telemetry is pruned after approximately 90 days.
- Visit analytics, Identifiable visit analytics are pruned after approximately 6 months; anonymous aggregates are kept for around 2 years.
- Anonymised suburb statistics, Anonymised suburb and listing observations are retained indefinitely. They carry no account-identifying information and are not deleted with an account.
11. Cookies
We use cookies per your consent choices: essential cookies always, analytics/marketing/ functional cookies only if you allow them. The full list, and how to change your preferences at any time, is in our Cookie Policy.
12. Your Rights
Under POPIA, you have the right to:
- Access the personal information we hold about you;
- Request correction of inaccurate or outdated information;
- Request deletion of your personal information, subject to our legal retention obligations;
- Object to processing of your personal information, including for direct marketing, at any time;
- Lodge a complaint with the Information Regulator (see below) if you believe we have not complied with POPIA.
You can exercise these rights from your account settings, or by emailing hello@realteasy.co.za. Exercising your POPIA rights over your own information is free and does not require a formal request. Requests for access to other records are dealt with under the Promotion of Access to Information Act, 2000 ("PAIA"), and our PAIA Manual explains how.
13. Information Regulator
If you are unsatisfied with how we have handled your personal information, you may contact South Africa's Information Regulator:
Information Regulator (South Africa)JD House, 27 Stiemens Street, Braamfontein, Johannesburg, 2001
inforeg@justice.gov.za · inforegulator.org.za
14. Responsible Party
RealTeasy (Pty) Ltd, 3 Woodmere Street, Cape Town, South Africa. hello@realteasy.co.za. Full company details are on the Legal & Company Information page.