Group Privacy Policy
Altius Group Limited – hereafter known as “Altius Group”, “We”, “Us” – aim to provide our customers and clients with the best possible safe and secure services. We are committed to protecting and respecting your privacy. We use the personal information you share with us to tailor our services to your requirements, and to provide the best possible user experience when dealing with our employees or agents or when using our website.
Our “Services” comprise commercial business sales agency services.
Personal Information We Collect
“Personal information” is any information that relates to you and identifies you personally, either alone or in combination with other information available to us.
We may collect and process the following personal information about you:
- Information that you provide by: –
- entering into a contractual agreement with us so as to engage our Services,
- filling in forms on our Website, third party websites and Portals which send information to us,
- in person,
- via telephone calls, emails, live web chat, and social media.
This information can include, but is not limited to, personal information (name, address, email address and telephone number(s)); financial or employment information that you disclose when you contact us or enter in to a contractual relationship with us.
- Information required when our agents are attending external appointments such as viewings and market appraisals.
- Information required to comply with legislation such as The Money Laundering, Terrorist Financing and Transfer of Funds (Information on the Payer) Regulations 2017 (more commonly referred to as the Money Laundering Regulations 2017) which is a legal requirement for a number of our Services.
- Information to enable us to tailor our marketing and communications to you, based on your personal preferences, such as the types of service you are looking for, your location etc (hereafter “Criteria”).
- If you contact us, we may keep a record of that correspondence and ask for information if you report an issue with our Services.
- We may also ask you to complete surveys, either on our own Website or through a third-party provider, which we use for research purposes; although you do not have to respond to them.
- When you visit or otherwise access our Website, details including but not limited to: –
- information about the device and browser (hereafter “Device”) you are using to access the Website e.g. type, version, operating system, etc.,
- traffic data including the URL of the website that referred you to our website if applicable
- location data including geolocation (this can be explicitly controlled in your Device),
- weblogs and other communication data,
- the resources that you access including social media interaction.
- your IP (Internet Protocol) address,
- the date and time of the visit and how long you remained on our Website,
- the pages visited on our Website and interactions performed,
You consent to any information concerning you which we collect, and process being used, stored amy-3nd processed in accordance with this Policy.
How We Use Your Personal Information
The personal information we collect when you contact us will be used for identification and authentication purposes in addition to creating a profile for you with the information needed to provide you with our Services. We use and analyse this personal information where necessary for the following purposes detailed below: –
- Improving our products and services: we will use your personal information to build a profile on you in order to understand your requirements, to improve our Website, as well as to personalise the properties and Services we offer you. We process your personal information in this way as it is necessary for the purposes of our legitimate interests in providing better products and Services for you and our other customers.
- Processing your transaction: we use relevant personal information described above (including your name, address and financial details) to enable us to complete a transaction with you when you are using any of our Services. This information may require to be passed on to third parties, including but not limited to solicitors, surveyors, financial advisors etc.
- Fraud prevention and detection: we will also use your personal information to assess your creditworthiness and to prevent fraud. For this purpose, we may need to share your personal information with our referencing providers and/or solicitors (see “how we share your personal information” below). This is necessary for the purposes of our legitimate interests in ensuring we are not the victim of fraud and to protect our legal rights.
- To provide customer support: if you contact our team (or vice versa), we will use personal information such as your email address, phone number and residential address as well as your contact history to process your request and provide you with the best service possible. We will process your personal information in this way if it is necessary for the performance of a contract or if it is required for us to comply with any legal obligations. If it is not necessary to process your personal data for either of these reasons we will process it as it is necessary for the purposes of our legitimate interests in ensuring, we can provide the best service possible.
- Marketing & Opting Out: When you register your details with us for any of our Services, or enter in to a transaction with us, provide feedback on our service online or use our Website; we will use your personal information to create a profile based on the information we hold about you. This is necessary for the purposes of our legitimate interests in ensuring we have accurate information about you in one place. We create your profile in accordance with your preferences in order to provide you with the best personalised experience, to send you relevant and personalised information, Service information and for opinion research purposes. Below you can find a more detailed description of the ways in which we will use your personal information for these purposes, you can opt out at any time. See ‘Your rights’ below for more information.
Type of Information
The way you interact with us across all the different channels described above (e.g. our Website, social media and marketing messages we send you) and the information we collect in that regard from each of these channels provides us valuable information about you. This insight gives us the opportunity to offer you the best customer service experience possible. To learn about you and your interests, we analyse your interactions with the Altius Group using various kinds of information, as set out above. If you have registered your details with Us or engaged one of our Services by entering into a contract with Us, or if We are permitted by law to send such communications without obtaining your consent, We use the information that you have provided to us when interacting with us for sending you personalised marketing messages about our products or services, events and promotions. In some instances, we will also aggregate your personal information with that of other individuals, to create comprehensive reports about how clients and customers use our products and services. This is necessary for the purposes of our legitimate interests in analysing our brand and determining how to improve our services.
Information Channels
We will send direct communications to you via the channel you choose, such as post, email, phone, or social media.
Communications
Will be personalised and tailored to you. We use analytics in order to generate such personalised messages. We personalise these messages on the basis of that it is necessary for the purposes of our legitimate interests in ensuring that we provide the most appropriate information. We will, in certain circumstances, also use the channels for opinion research (such as to ask if you would like to participate in a survey) and to learn about your experience and improve your experience with the Altius Group, including by sending you personalised messages.
Analysing Our Business
We will use your personal information (including by anonymising and aggregating it with other customers’ personal information) for sales and financial analysis purposes, to determine how the Altius Group is performing and where improvements can be made and where necessary to report back to our group. This is necessary for the purposes of our legitimate interests in understanding how our business is performing and considering how to improve our performance.
We will ask for your consent if we wish to use your personal information for purposes other than those listed in this privacy statement and as required to do so under applicable law. We will not use your personal information for other purposes before we have received such consent.
Disclosure of Your Information
We treat your personal information with care and confidentiality and do not share it with third parties other than in accordance with and pursuant to any contractual agreement between us. We may disclose your personal information to any member of our group, which means our subsidiaries, our ultimate holding company and its subsidiaries, as defined in section 1159 of the UK Companies Act 2006.
With Service Providers
Where required we may share personal information you provide when you register with us or enter in to a contract with us, as necessary and only for the purposes and on the lawful grounds described above with various third parties who process your personal information on our behalf (Data Processors), and to whom have appropriate safeguards to ensure they are GDPR compliant such as:
Sales
Including but not limited to prospective purchasers, Solicitors/Conveyancers, Surveyors, Financial/Mortgage advisors, other estate agents, software and system providers and website hosts.
We require that these service providers and other third parties adhere to strict rules when processing your personal information, including to only use your personal information in accordance with our specific instructions.
Call Recording & Monitoring
- We may monitor and record communications with you (such as telephone conversations and emails) for the purpose of training, fraud prevention and compliance.
- All calls coming into and out of the offices may be recorded for quality monitoring, training, compliance and security purposes. This allows the company to review call quality and assess customer satisfaction. Written records only provide partial information, whereas a call recording provides a more rounded view and allows us to better understand customer experience and assess the processes applied.
IP Addresses and Cookies
- To estimate our audience size and usage pattern.
- To store information about your preferences, and so allow us to customise our site according to your individual interests.
- To speed up your searches.
- To recognise you when you return to our site.
You may refuse to accept cookies by activating the setting on your browser which allows you to refuse the setting of cookies. However, if you select this setting you may be unable to access certain parts of our site. Unless you have adjusted your browser setting so that it will refuse cookies, our system will issue cookies when you log on to our website. For more information on cookies used on our website please visit here.
Online Advertising, We Use
- Google analytics & re-marketing
- Our websites use Google analytics and Google’s re-marketing technology. This technology enables users who have already visited our online services and shown interest in our services to see targeted advertising on Google partner network websites. Likewise, users that are similar to the visitors of our websites can be addressed. The advertising will be displayed through the use of web cookies. Using cookies, the user behaviour on a website can be analysed and subsequently utilised to provide targeted product recommendations and advertising based on the user’s interests.
- Please note that Google has its own data protection policy, which is independent of our own. We assume no responsibility or liability for their policies and procedures. Please read Google’s privacy policy before using our websites. How Google uses data
Legal / Law Enforcement
The Altius Group will disclose personal information where required by law or legal process, for the administration of justice, to protect your vital interest, for investigations by law enforcement or regulatory bodies, to protect and defend the Altius Group’s property and legal rights, to protect the personal safety of our website users or by order of a valid injunction from a court or law enforcement agency.
Business Interests
In the event that we sell or buy any business or assets, we may disclose your personal data to the prospective seller or buyer of such business or assets.
If the Altius Group is or all of its assets are acquired by a third party, personal data held by us about our customers will be one of the transferred assets.
Personal Information of Third Parties
Before you disclose to us the personal information of another person, you must obtain that person’s consent to both the disclosure and the processing of that personal information in accordance with the terms of this privacy policy.
Storage of Personal Information
The length of time we hold your information for will vary dependent on lawful basis for collecting and processing the data.
The Altius Group will hold data supplied where there is a legitimate interest in doing so (such as where a client or customer has contacted us, expressing an interest in in any of our Services such as buying or selling a business through us) for a period of seven years.
Where a transaction has been entered in to and there is a contractual necessity to do so, or where there is a requirement to comply with legal obligations (for example in order to comply with the Money Laundering Regulations 2017 requirement to hold records for a period of 5 years).
All information you provide to us is stored in the UK on our secure (password and firewall protected) servers and all paper-based information is also securely stored in the UK. All electronic transactions and data transmissions between your Device and our Website will be encrypted. Unfortunately, the transmission of information via the internet is not completely secure and so we cannot guarantee the security of any data sent over the internet between your Device and our Website. Any such data transmission is at your own risk.
Once we have received your information, we will use strict procedures and security features to try to prevent unauthorised access, as part of our secure backups and data disaster recovery procedures. By submitting your personal data to us, you agree to this transfer, storing or processing.
Your Rights
You have the right to ask us not to process your personal data for marketing purposes, to alter your preferences for the type of marketing content you receive (such as properties for sale, information about related services etc) or to alter the methods via which you receive marketing correspondence from us (i.e. via email, text, post or phone call). We will inform you (before collecting your data) if we intend to use your data for such purposes or if we intend to disclose your information to any third party for such purposes. You can also exercise the right to prevent such processing of your data at any time by contacting us in writing at our registered address.
Our Website may, from time to time, contain links to and from the websites of third-party service providers. If you follow a link to any of these websites, please note that these websites may have their own privacy policies and that we do not accept any responsibility or liability for these policies. Please check these policies before you submit any personal data to these websites. Use of third-party websites is at your own risk.
Subject Access Request
You can update some of your personal information by contacting us and we will be able to update your records on our data management systems – please let us know if the personal information which we hold about you needs to be corrected or updated.
If you would like to know what personal information the Altius Group holds about you, you may make a request to the Altius Group for copies of this information. You should be aware that we will need to see proof of identity before processing any such request (known as a ‘subject access request’). If requested, the Altius Group will use reasonable efforts to supply, correct or delete information about you on file.
All subject access requests should be made in writing and addressed to the Altius Group Limited, Eaves Brook House, Navigation Way, Preston, PR2 2YP.
In addition, you may write to us at any time requesting amendments to certain personal information that you consider to be incorrect or irrelevant or to request that we block, erase or otherwise remove your personal information (The Right to Erasure/The Right to be Forgotten).
You may also write to us at any time to object to our use of your personal information or request that we provide your personal information in a usable electronic format and transmit to a third party (Right to Data Portability). We will comply with these requests in relation to your personal information in line with applicable law. Reasonable fees may be charged for manifestly unfounded or excessive requests, all requests will be processed in accordance with the legislative time frame.
Personal Data Breaches
In order to comply with applicable law, the Altius Group has implemented procedures to detect, report and investigate personal data breaches.
A data breach is defined by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) as;
“A breach of security leading to the destruction, loss, alteration, unauthorised disclosure or, or access to, personal data.”
The ICO will be informed of all data breaches which present a high risk to our clients and customer’s rights and freedoms and in line with applicable law, a notifiable breach will be reported within 72 hours of us becoming aware of it. The individual(s) involved will also be informed.
Changes
The Altius Group has pledged to adhere to the fundamental principles of privacy and data protection. We therefore regularly review our privacy statement in order to ensure that it is free of errors and clearly visible on our Website, that it contains appropriate information about your rights and our processing activities, and that it is implemented and is compliant with applicable law. We welcome your feedback and questions. If you wish to contact us, please send an email to CustomerService@Altiusgroup.co.uk. You should check this Policy occasionally to ensure you are aware of the most recent version which will apply each time you access our site, the services we provide, or you provide us with personal information in another way.
Complaints
If you have a complaint regarding how the Altius Group have handled your personal data, subject access request or right to erasure, you have a right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority, in this case the ICO, using the contact details below.
Information Commissioner’s Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire, SK9 5AF
