Who we are
This policy explains how European.realestate handles personal data. We run european.realestate, a marketplace where estate agents and private owners list property across Europe and where buyers and renters search it.
| Data controller | European.realestate |
|---|---|
| Location | Wassenaar, The Netherlands |
| VAT number | NL001724517B02 |
| info@european.realestate | |
| Telephone | +31 6 1041 4496 |
We are the controller for the personal data described in this policy: we decide why it is processed and how. If you have a question about this policy or about your data, write to us at info@european.realestate and we will answer.
This policy covers our website, the accounts you can create on it, the property listings and enquiries, the packages you can buy, the XML feeds we import for agencies, and the assistant and search features on the site. It does not cover a website you reach through a link from ours.
What we collect
We only hold what we need for the purposes below. Depending on how you use the site, that is:
| Category | What it includes | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Account data | Your name, username, email address, password (stored as a hash, never readable by us), preferred language, and whether the account is a private or a company account. | You, when you register or edit your profile. |
| Contact data | Telephone number, postal address, company name and VAT number where you give them. | You. |
| Listing data | The properties you publish: location, description, price, surface, rooms, energy label, features, photos, video and virtual tour links, and the reference numbers you use. | You, or your feed. |
| Enquiries and messages | The messages you send to an agent or a seller through a listing, and the replies. | You, and the person who answers. |
| Payment and invoice data | Which package you bought, the invoices we issue, and the payment status. We never receive or store your full card number or bank credentials; the payment provider handles those. | You and the payment provider. |
| Saved searches and alerts | The searches you save and the email address that receives the alert when new properties match. | You. |
| Listing statistics | For agents: how often your listings were shown, opened and contacted, so you can see what your advertising does. | Generated from visits to the site. |
| Assistant conversations | What you type to the assistant on the site, the properties it looked at for you, and the answers. Conversations are kept with your account so you can open them again. | You. |
| Usage and device data | Your IP address, browser and device type, the pages you open, and how you arrived. See cookies and similar technologies. | Your visit. |
| Notification subscription | The browser push subscription you create if you switch notifications on, which lets us send you new-property alerts. | You, and your browser. |
We do not ask for special categories of data (such as health data) and you should not send them to us.
Why we process it, and on what basis
Every purpose below rests on one of the legal bases in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
| Purpose | Legal basis |
|---|---|
| Creating and managing your account, letting you sign in, and keeping the site secure. | Performance of our contract with you. |
| Publishing, showing and searching property listings, and passing your enquiry to the agent or seller it concerns. | Performance of our contract with you. |
| Taking payment, issuing invoices, and keeping the financial administration. | Performance of our contract, and our legal obligation to keep records. |
| Sending you service mail: account confirmation, an enquiry you received, a saved-search alert you asked for, and messages about your package such as a renewal or a failed payment. | Performance of our contract, and our legitimate interest in telling you something that affects your account. |
| Sending our newsletter, and browser notifications. | Your consent, which you can withdraw at any time. Browser notifications stop the moment you switch them off. |
| Statistics: understanding which pages and listings are used, so we can improve the site and the search. | Our legitimate interest in running and improving the service, balanced against your rights. See the cookie section. |
| Protecting the site against spam, fraud and abuse, and keeping it available. | Our legitimate interest in a safe service, and our legal obligations towards our users. |
| Answering you when you write to us, and handling a complaint. | Our legitimate interest in answering, and the performance of our contract. |
| Answering the questions you put to the assistant on the site. Your message and the property data it needs are sent to an external AI service, which returns an answer to us and to you. We do not use your conversations to train anyone’s model. | Performance of our contract when you ask for it, and our legitimate interest in offering the feature. |
| Establishing, exercising or defending legal claims. | Our legitimate interest in protecting our rights. |
Where we rely on a legitimate interest, you may object to that processing at any time; see your rights. We then weigh your objection and stop unless we have compelling grounds that outweigh it.
How long we keep it
We keep personal data no longer than we need it for the purpose it was collected for, or for as long as a law tells us to keep it. In practice:
| What | How long |
|---|---|
| Account data | While your account exists. After you delete the account we remove it within 30 days, except where a record below must be kept longer. |
| Listings and the photos on them | While they are published, and until you delete them or your package expires. A listing that is removed from a feed is taken offline but its data stays available to you. |
| Enquiries and messages | 24 months after the last message in the conversation, so that you and the agent can look back at it. |
| Invoices and financial records | 7 years, which is the period Dutch tax law requires us to keep them. |
| Assistant conversations | As long as your account exists. You can delete a conversation in the assistant yourself. |
| Saved searches and alerts | Until you delete the search, and 30 days after your account is deleted. |
| Listing statistics for agents | The current and previous period, after which they are aggregated and no longer linked to a visit. |
| Newsletter subscription | Until you unsubscribe, and 30 days after that in case we must prove you opted in. |
| Email log | 14 days. We log that a message was delivered or bounced, for support. |
| Server, security and delivery logs, including our CDN | As short as the service allows, normally no more than 30 days, and only to keep the site online and to investigate abuse. |
Cookies and similar technologies
A cookie is a small file a site stores in your browser. We also use related techniques such as local storage and a browser push subscription. They fall into three groups.
| Group | What they do | Set by |
|---|---|---|
| Necessary | Keeping you signed in, remembering your language and currency, keeping the contents of your shopping basket, protecting forms against automated abuse, and spreading traffic so nothing overloads. | european.realestate, Cloudflare, Cloudflare Turnstile |
| Statistics | Counting visits and pages so we can see how the site is used and improve it. The data is aggregated and we do not use it to identify you. | Google Analytics |
| Comfort and third parties | Showing a YouTube video inside a listing, translating a page into your language, and sending you a browser notification when a new property matches your search. | YouTube (Google), GTranslate, Perfecty, and your browser’s push service |
You are in control. You can block or delete cookies in your browser at any time, and you can turn browser notifications off in the notification itself or in your browser settings. Blocking the necessary group will stop parts of the site from working, such as staying signed in.
Where we rely on your consent for something that is not needed to serve the page, we ask for that choice and you can change it later. We are tightening the way the site collects that choice for statistics and embedded videos, so that nothing in those groups is placed before you have been asked.
Who else sees your data
We do not sell personal data, and we do not hand it to anyone for their own advertising. We share it only where it is needed to run the service, and only with parties who are bound to handle it under our instructions or under their own legal duty.
| Party | What for |
|---|---|
| The agent or owner of the property you enquire about | So they can answer you. Your name, your contact details and your message are passed to them because you asked them a question. |
| Our hosting provider, Repute | Holding the site and the database, in the Netherlands. |
| Cloudflare | Delivering the site and the images, protecting it against attacks and abuse, and holding our media storage. |
| Mollie, and WooCommerce Payments | Processing the payment for your package, and handling refunds. They receive the payment details; we receive the outcome. |
| Amazon Web Services | Sending our email. |
| Statistics, embedded YouTube videos on listings, and the review widget we show on some pages. | |
| Our external AI service provider | Answering your message to the assistant. They receive the text of your message and the property data needed to answer it. We name our current AI providers on request. |
| GTranslate | Translating the site and our emails into the language you choose. |
| Our bookkeeper and accountant | Preparing and filing the financial administration, which includes the invoices we issue. |
| Authorities, courts and advisers | Only where the law requires it, or where it is necessary to establish, exercise or defend a legal claim. |
Some of these parties are processors: they act only on our instructions. Others, such as a payment provider or a tax authority, have their own legal responsibility for what they hold.
Transfers outside the EEA
Most of your data stays in the European Economic Area: our hosting, our payment provider and our bookkeeping are all here. Some service providers work globally, and a transfer to a country outside the EEA can therefore happen, for example when our CDN serves a page from a nearby edge location, when email is delivered, or when the assistant asks an AI provider that processes outside the EEA.
Where that happens, the transfer is covered by an adequacy decision of the European Commission, or by the standard contractual clauses with additional measures where they are needed. You can ask us for the safeguards that apply to a specific transfer, and we will tell you which ones we used.
How we protect it
We encrypt the connection between your browser and the site, store passwords only as a hash, limit who inside our organisation can reach the database, keep an audit of failed sign-ins, run a firewall and malware scanning on the site, and take backups so we can restore it. Access to the administration is limited to named accounts.
No method of sending or storing data is completely secure. If a breach ever affects your data in a way that carries a risk to you, we will tell you and the Dutch Data Protection Authority as the law requires.
Your rights
You have the following rights over your personal data. Write to info@european.realestate and we will handle it, normally within one month.
| Right | What it means |
|---|---|
| Access | You can ask what data we hold about you and get a copy. |
| Rectification | You can have data corrected when it is wrong or incomplete. Much of it you can edit yourself in your account. |
| Erasure | You can ask us to delete your data. We do so unless we must keep it, for example an invoice for the tax period. |
| Restriction | You can ask us to stop using data while a dispute about it is unresolved. |
| Portability | You can receive the data you gave us in a machine-readable file, or have us send it to another provider. |
| Objection | You can object to processing we base on our legitimate interest, including the statistics we keep. We then stop unless we have compelling grounds. |
| Withdraw consent | Where we rely on your consent, for the newsletter or for browser notifications, you can withdraw it at any time. What you already received stays valid. |
Deleting your account removes your profile, your listings and, for an agent, the feed settings we hold for you.
If you are not satisfied with how we handled your request, you can complain to the Dutch Data Protection Authority, the Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens, Postbus 93374, 2509 AJ Den Haag, telephone +31 88 180 52 50. You can also go to the supervisory authority in your own country.
Automated answers, and no profiling decisions
We do not make decisions about you by automated means that have legal consequences for you or that affect you in a similarly significant way. Nothing on the site decides whether you may register, may publish or may buy.
The assistant on the site generates text with the help of an external AI service. It answers your question about property, it does not judge you. Its answer can be wrong or incomplete, which is why the listing and the agent always come first, and why you can always ask us to look at a case by hand by writing to info@european.realestate.
Children
Our service is meant for adults. You must be at least 18 years old to register, to publish a property or to buy a package. We do not knowingly collect data about children. If you believe a child has given us personal data, tell us and we will remove it.
Changes to this policy
We update this policy when something about our processing changes: a new service, a new purpose, or a change in the law. The version and the date at the top of this page always show the current one.
If a change materially affects you, we tell you in the account or by email before it takes effect. Continuing to use the site after that means you accept the updated policy, and you can always close your account if you do not.
Contact us
For a question about this policy, a request about your data, or a complaint, reach us here:
| info@european.realestate | |
| Telephone | +31 6 1041 4496 |
| Online | european.realestate/contact |
Tell us what it concerns and which email address or account it belongs to, so we can find your data quickly. We answer within one month, and sooner where we can.