Privacy Policy

Effective 2 September 2026 · Version 1.3

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, offers, contacts, viewings and tasks you record against them, plus saved search preferences (suburbs, budget and size) if you set them.
Agent profile information, if you register as an estate agent: your agency name, PPRA/FFC number, phone number, a short bio, and the service areas you pick on the map. When you unlock a request, the person who made it is told which agency unlocked it.
Map coordinates, derived from addresses you submit or pick from the address search. We store them with the property or request to match service areas and leads by geography and to draw maps.
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 (Payfast); 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; pass your contact details to estate agents where you have asked us to (see section 8); 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, and any sharing of your details with estate agents, are processed on the basis of your consent, and neither is a condition of getting a report. 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.
Payfast, payment processing (subscriptions, top-ups).
Google, address autocomplete and maps (Places and Maps), server-side geocoding of addresses you submit (to derive the coordinates described in section 1), 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. Sharing Your Details With Estate Agents

Two features share your contact details with estate agents. Both are strictly opt-in: nothing is shared unless you fill in the form and tick the consent box, and we never pass on the details of someone who merely ran a report.

Find an agent (on a Home Valuation), you ask agents who work your suburb to contact you about selling your home.
Ask an agent (on a Property Scan), you ask agents who work that suburb to contact you about buying the listing you scanned.

Before you consent, agents see only an anonymised card: the suburb, the property type, its size, a price band rounded to the nearest R100 000, and how long ago the request was made. Your name, phone number, email and any note you wrote are hidden. An agent spends credits to unlock them, and only then do we pass them on.

Requests are non-exclusive, more than one agent may unlock the same request, and we tell you each time one does. An estate agent who unlocks your details is not our processor: they receive your information as a separate responsible party under POPIA and are responsible for their own use of it under their own privacy terms.

The lawful basis is your consent (POPIA section 11(1)(a)), recorded with a timestamp at the moment you tick the box. You can withdraw it at any time by closing the request from the report's Actions tab: your details stop being offered to any further agent immediately. Agents who already unlocked them will still hold what they were given, so if you want them to stop contacting you, tell them directly, or email us and we will pass the request on.

Records estate agents keep in their own book. An agent using RealTeasy can record details about their own clients against a mandate they hold: a seller's name and phone number, and buyer leads they capture themselves. That information is the agent's own client record. The agent is the responsible party for it under POPIA; we store and display it only to that agent's account, never on any public page, and never use it to contact anyone. Deleting the property removes it.

Property Passports. An agent may publish a shareable public page for a property they hold a mandate on. That page shows the property only: a headline, the suburb and city, photographs and, if the agent chooses, an AI estimate. It never shows the owner's name, contact details or exact street address, and the agent warrants to us that they have the mandate holder's permission to publish it (see the Terms). The agent can unpublish it at any time.

9. 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.

10. 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.

11. 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.

12. 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.

13. 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.

14. 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

15. 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.