Chartered Surveyors

Call 0333 772 1235

Overview
At Bruton Knowles we take our obligations under privacy and data protection law very seriously. This Privacy Statement is designed to help you understand what Personal Information we collect, why, how we use it and who we share it with. It also explains the rights you have in connection with your Personal Information, including how to contact us or to make a complaint.

This notice applies to Bruton Knowles Ltd, who we also refer to throughout as "we", "us" or "our".

If you have any questions about this statement please get in touch with your usual Bruton Knowles contact or see below for our Contact Information.

This Privacy Statement may change from time to time and in response to guidance and best practice advice issued by the Information Commissioner's Office. We will inform you of changes to this Privacy Statement via our website.

What Personal Information do we collect and use?
The type of Personal Information we collect and process depends on our relationship with you and the context in which we obtain and use it.

Clients – where we are advising and/or acting for you
We will require certain Personal Information to be able to provide our service to you. If you do not provide Personal Information we ask for, it may delay or prevent us from providing services to you.

Business development and Website use
If we are advising and/or acting for you, if we have or would like to have a business relationship with you or if you visit our Website.

  • Details about the services and property updates you specifically request
  • Information you provide to us about our services, for example by completing client satisfaction surveys
  • Technical Personal Information in connection with details of your visits to our Website including your internet protocol (IP) address used to connect your computer to the Internet, browser type and version, time zone setting, browser plug-in types and versions, operating systems and platforms (see also below - Visitors to our Website)
  • Details of your name, email address and marketing preferences if you subscribe to our updates and communications via our Website.

How Personal Information is collected and your responsibilities
We will collect Personal Information from you in person when we meet you or through correspondence with you in relation to your instruction, via our Website and secure online portals e.g. Rightmove.

Third parties may pass Personal Information to us to use in the course of providing our property services. The processing of this Personal Information may be necessary for the progression of your instruction and to enable us to act in your best interests as your property adviser.

The sources we may also collect Personal Information from include:

  • Publicly accessible sources, e.g. Companies House or HM Land Registry
  • Direct from a third party, e.g. Data House
  • Our systems, e.g. document management and time recording systems; reception logs; our Website other relevant websites and applications
  • Automated monitoring of our Website and other technical systems, such as email, voicemail and instant messaging systems.

When we provide our services to you, we may hold and use Personal Information about you. When you provide Personal Information to us relating to a third party you confirm that you have any necessary permission or authority to do so. You are also responsible for ensuring that the provision of that Personal Information complies with data protection and other applicable law.

Visitors to our website
We use Google Analytics to collect statistical information about the number of visitors to our Website. This information includes, pages visited and content searched. Further information can be obtained from the Google Privacy Policy. We use this information to maintain and improve our Website and the services we provide and to analyse and understand what is of interest to our Website visitors so we can improve and tailor the content and this data will not directly or indirectly reveal your identity.

We use technology to track the patterns of behaviour of visitors to our Website. This can include using a "cookie" which would be stored on your browser or the hard drive of your computing device. Any data sent to us via this website will pass through systems operated by our website hosting partner. We use cookies to collect anonymous standard internet log information and details of visitor behaviour patterns. We do this to find out things such as the number of visitors to the various parts of the site. We collect this information in a way which does not identify anyone. On this website we use some permanent cookies. These retain the information they collect for varying timescales depending on the cookie. We also use session cookies which are temporary and are erased when you exit your web browser.

Our Website is not intended for children and, other than in connection with work experience applicants we do not knowingly collect data relating to children via the Website.

How and why we use your personal information

Under data protection law, we can only use your Personal Information if we have a proper reason for doing so, for example:

  • to comply with our legal and regulatory obligations
  • for our legitimate interests
  • for the performance of our contract with you or to take steps at your request before entering into a contract
  • you have given consent.

Change of purpose
We will only use your Personal Information for the purposes for which we collected it, unless we reasonably consider that we need to use it for another reason and that reason is compatible with the original purpose.

If we need to use your Personal Information for an unrelated purpose, we will notify you and we will explain the legal basis which allows us to do so.

Marketing communications
We may use your Personal Information to send you updates (by email, telephone or post) about property related services that might be of interest to you.

We have a legitimate interest in processing your Personal Information for our business development purposes.

This means we do not usually need your consent to send you property updates and information about our range of property related services. However, where consent is needed (for example to send you electronic communications), we will ask for this consent separately and clearly.

We will never sell or share it with other organisations for marketing purposes.

You have the right to opt out of receiving marketing communications at any time by:

  • using the ‘unsubscribe’ link in our emails.
  • Emailing us and asking to be opted out of marketing communications

We may ask you to confirm or update your marketing preferences if you instruct us to provide further services in the future, or if there are changes in the law, regulation, or the structure of our business.

Who we share your Personal Information with
We may disclose and exchange information with law enforcement agencies and regulatory bodies to comply with our legal and regulatory obligations.

Our IT service provider may access your Personal Information as a consequence of them providing support to us. We only allow our IT service provider to handle your Personal Information if we are satisfied they take appropriate measures to protect your Personal Information. We also impose contractual obligations on our IT service provider to ensure they can only use your Personal Information to provide services to us and to you.

Where your Personal Information is held
Information may be held at our offices. We also hold your Personal Information in secure data centres in the UK (and in relation to personal data held in our client relationship management system only, in secure data centres in within the European Economic Area) with all reasonable technological and operational measures put in place to safeguard it from unauthorised access.

How long your Personal Information will be kept
We will only retain your personal information for as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, accounting, or reporting requirements. When it is no longer necessary to retain your Personal Information, we will delete it.

Data Complaints or requests
If you are not a client of ours but you complain to us about how we have processed your Personal Information or you seek to exercise a data protection right such as a data subject access request, we will retain details of your complaint or request. We will only use the Personal Information we collect to process the complaint or request, to audit the level of service we have provided and to provide information to the regulator.

We hope that we can resolve any query or concern you may raise about our use of your information. If you want to complain about how we have handled your Personal Information, please follow our complaints procedure available upon request.

We will investigate your complaint but if you are not satisfied with our response or believe we are processing your Personal Information unlawfully, you can complain to the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO). Further information is available on the ICO website.

For further information read our Data Protection Policy.

Contact Information
Please contact us by post, email or telephone if you have any questions about this privacy policy or the information we hold about you.

Call 0333 772 1235 or email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Or alternatively you can write to Data Protection Queries, Bruton Knowles, Olympus House, Olympus Park, Quedgeley, Gloucester GL2 4NF

This Privacy Statement was last updated on 17 Sept 2019..