Privacy Policy | Estrentals

Est. Rentals Privacy Policy

Introduction

In this Privacy Policy a reference to “we”, “us”, “our”, “Est.” is a reference to Est Resident Services ACN 670 713 658 and each of our “group entities” (meaning any related body corporate or associated entity of any of these named entities or within their group of companies).

Est. (and its group entities), as an agent and/or property manager, represents “build to rent” businesses (including associated entities) and provides residential rental and tenancy services in respect of the properties owned by those businesses.

Additionally, Est. uses the Est. Rentals website www.estrentals.com.au (Website) to provide information and content in relation to Est. serviced properties, the Est. members’ website portal (Est. Tenant Portal) which provides a platform to submit rental applications, and the MyBuildings, StarRez and Erin Living applications and related materials (together, the Apps), which are linked to the Est. Tenant Portal and provide platforms for tenants of Est. serviced properties to carry out the usual interactions and functions in respect of their tenancy such as making rental payments.

Est. is committed to respecting and protecting the privacy of your personal information.

This privacy policy (Privacy Policy) explains how we will collect, use, disclose, store, and protect personal information about you. This Privacy Policy also describes the way in which you may access or correct your personal information that we hold, and how to contact us if you have any complaints in relation to your privacy.

We will handle your personal information under applicable privacy laws, including the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) (Privacy Act) and the Australian Privacy Principles (APPs).

What is ‘personal information’?

‘Personal information’ includes information or an opinion about an identified individual, or an individual who is reasonably identifiable, whether or not the information is true, and whether or not the information is recorded in a material form. For example, this may include your name, age, gender, residential address and contact details.

Personal information includes ‘sensitive information’, which is a special subset of personal information. Sensitive information includes identifying health information about you, eg: details of your health and medical history, information about your racial or ethnic origin, political opinions or associations, religious or philosophical beliefs, and sexual orientation or practices.

Why we collect your personal information

We may collect personal information from you for the purposes of conducting our business (as property agent and property manager), providing our goods and services, providing access to the Est. Tenant Portal, or access to the Apps.

When you access our Website, make an inquiry, use the Est. Tenant Portal, or otherwise contact us, we collect the personal information that you give us such as your name, your telephone number, your address and email address and your date of birth. We do this so that we can provide you with our goods and services. We also keep personal information so that we can respond to queries and provide support to you in your use of the Website and the Est. Tenant Portal.

You are not required to disclose your personal information to us. However, if you do not provide the information requested, you may not be able to receive the full benefit of our goods and services, or our Website, Est. Tenant Portal or Apps.

What types of personal information do we collect?

We may collect the following personal information when you contact our business, or access or use our Est. Tenant Portal, Website or App:

· your name, residential address, email address and phone number;

· your age, date of birth and gender;

· identification documents;

· current and past residences;

· names of family members and emergency contact details and referee details;

· occupation details (current and past);

· your log in details and password used to sign in to your account on the Est. Tenant Portal and the Apps;

· your banking, payment and billing details;

· your social media accounts (e.g. Facebook, Instagram and TikTok) where you have connected to us;

· any information you voluntarily share with us when you interact with us via phone, email, social media or other form of communication;

· your marketing preferences such as whether you wish to receive communications from us; and

· any other information you share with us as part of your interactions with us.

We also collect your personal information through cookies (see further below).

How do we collect your personal information?

We collect your personal information in a lawful and fair way and in a manner that is not unreasonably intrusive.

We collect your personal information when:

· you provide us with personal information and/or sensitive information when you contact us, and when you visit, access or use our Website, the Est. Tenant Portal or an App;

· submit any forms or surveys via the Website, the Est. Tenant Portal or an App;

· you interact with us via phone, email, social media or any other form of communication;

· we collect your billing and payment information; and

· you consent to receive marketing or newsletter communications from us.

How do we use your personal information?

We generally use your personal information for the following main purposes:

· for the purpose of operating a real estate business dealing with landlords and tenants (including as agent and property manager), and related matters in respect of such tenancies;

· to create and set up your account with us;

· to enable you to access and use our goods and services;

· to prepare and deliver to you the goods and services that you purchase;

· to allow you to access and use the Website, the Est. Tenant Portal or an App;

· to provide information about our goods and services, the Website, Website, the Est. Tenant Portal or an App (including updates, competitions, promotions and marketing messages);

· to obtain feedback from you so we can continually enhance our product and service offerings (including the Website, Est. Tenant Portal and Apps);

· to record data and analytics for statistical and market analysis, which allows us to improve our service offerings (including the Website, Est. Tenant Portal and Apps);

· to provide to third party providers in the property industry including those who will assist with vetting, verifying, onboarding and managing your tenancy (including relevant trades and maintenance services during our offer of tenancy);

· to respond to data requests from you and to fulfil our commitments to data storage and freedom of information under relevant governing agreements and regulations; and

· to allow us to effectively respond to your complaints and enquiries.

In addition, we may from time to time use some of your personal information for other purposes such as:

· to verify your information and identity and to protect against fraud and other unlawful activities;

· to detect and prevent abuse of our products and services;

· to continually improve our products and service offering and the relevance of our marketing materials;

· to fulfil our reporting obligations to any relevant tax and regulatory bodies;

· to deal with the landlord and its advisers (including the landlord’s legal practitioner, mortgagee, financier and/or insurer);

· to communicate with referees that you have nominated;

· to communicate with and inform tradespeople and similar organisations to contact you in relation to maintenance to the premises;

· disclosing to relevant authorities matters in respect of your tenancy and to tribunals, courts and statutory authorities where necessary (including but not limited to Consumer Affairs Victoria, Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal);

· to communicate with and inform third party providers of tenancy databases (including but not limited to TICA);

· to communicate with and inform other real estate agents, property managers and landlords;

· enabling us to gain information from your previous property agents and landlords;

· enabling us to prepare the rental documents for the premises;

· paying or releasing rental bonds to or from the relevant residential bond authority;

· referring to landlord’s mortgagee, financier and/or insurer;

· reporting your conduct as a renter on the relevant third party tenancy database/s;

· to be entered into our sales databases and mailing lists (for this database and mailing list you can opt-out at any time); and

· to share certain information with relevant third parties in order to provide services and marketing messages to you.

We may also use your personal information for purposes which are permitted under the applicable privacy laws, which include:

· where we use your information for purposes which are directly related to the main purpose for which we collected it, in circumstances where you would reasonably expect us to use your information for these purposes;

· where we reasonably believe that use of your information is necessary to lessen or prevent a serious threat to the life, health or safety of any individual, or to public health or safety, and it is unreasonable or impracticable to obtain your consent.

Do we disclose your personal information to others?

We respect the privacy of your personal information and we take reasonable steps to keep it confidential and protected. However, we do provide your personal information to third parties during the life of a tenancy.

Certain aspects of our business (including the Est. Tenant Portal, the Apps and our payment systems) are integrated with third-party software and systems (third-party vendors) and, to provide the goods and services, we will need to disclose personal information to these third-party providers to the limited extent required to enable and support these integrated functions and to support the goods and services. We will endeavour to only disclose personal information to third parties with privacy policies in place that are committed to personal information security and complying with privacy laws.

We will not otherwise disclose your personal information to third parties unless it is consistent with the purpose for which we collected it, you have consented, or we are otherwise permitted or required to do so by law. This may include disclosure of your personal information in the following circumstances:

· disclosure to the landlord, personnel, contractors and consultants in respect of any tenancy or tenancy application;

· disclosure of financial information such as bank statements, tax returns, pay stubs and credit reports to third party providers for the purposes of verifying income, assets, liabilities and creditworthiness;

· disclosure to third party debt collectors for the purposes of the recovery of any outstanding debts;

· disclosure to trades and property service maintenance providers or other necessary service providers in order to provide you with property maintenance services or other necessary services;

· disclosure to comply with our legal obligations, including, but not limited to, where we are required to provide information under a subpoena or Court order or other mandatory reporting requirements under law;

· to communicate with the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner if we are subject to a data breach, you make a privacy complaint or that body makes an inquiry of us; or

· where this is reasonably necessary for the establishment, exercise or defence of any legal claim.

Where personal information is transferred or disclosed to such third parties, their access, storage and use will be subject to their own privacy policies. To the full extent permitted at law, we are not liable for any loss, damage or claim arising out of a third party’s access, storage or use of your personal information where we have transferred or disclosed the personal information to such third party in a manner consistent with this Privacy Policy, we were authorised by you or by law to provide that third party with your personal information.

We refer you to the privacy policies of our third party providers which include but are not limited to:

· Salesforce: https://www.salesforce.com/au/company/privacy/

· MyBuildings: https://checkin.mybuildings.com/Core/Pages/PrivacyPolicy.aspx;

· StarRez: https://www.starrez.com/legal/privacy; and

· Erin Living https://www.erinliving.com/privacy.

We use third party payment gateway providers to process your payment, including but not limited to NAB, Stripe, Nayax and BPay.

Do we transfer your personal information outside Australia?

In some cases, we may disclose personal information to third party suppliers and service providers located overseas to perform our contractual obligations to you.

When we disclose your personal information to these parties, we require them to take appropriate measures to protect your personal information.

How do we protect your personal information?

We take reasonable steps to protect personal information we hold about you from misuse, interference and loss, and from unauthorised access, modification, disclosure and destruction.

We use physical and technological security measures to protect the personal information we hold. We also work with suppliers and providers who use their reasonable endeavours to keep data secure.

We may hold your personal information in a number of ways (including electronically and in physical format). When we store information electronically, this may be on our computer systems, databases, software programs, third party clouds, internet servers and hosted internet solutions, which are protected through necessary security systems including firewalls, security systems and passwords.

We use a third-party platform with cloud storage provider with servers located in Australia which uses industry standard security measures.

When your personal information is no longer required to be retained under law or retained for our operational or administrative purposes (including account keeping and compliance purposes), we will take steps to securely destroy the information or to ensure that the information is permanently de-identified. Where a third party provider holds your personal information, their retention is subject to their own privacy policy (eg: a payment service may be required by law to retain certain account and financial information).

Data breaches

We are required to comply with the mandatory ‘notifiable data breach’ scheme (the NDB scheme) under the Privacy Act. The NDB scheme applies when an ‘eligible data breach’ of personal information occurs.

An ‘eligible data breach’ occurs when:

· there is unauthorised access to or unauthorised disclosure of personal information, or a loss of personal information, that an organisation holds;

· this is likely to result in serious harm to one or more individuals; and

· the organisation has not been able to prevent the likely risk of serious harm with remedial action.

An organisation may take remedial steps to prevent the likelihood of serious harm occurring for any affected individuals after a data breach has occurred, in which case, the data breach is not an ‘eligible data breach’.

Where we have reasonable grounds to believe that we have experienced an eligible data breach (and remedial action cannot be used), we will promptly notify affected individuals and the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner about the breach in accordance with the Privacy Act.

Our website and cookies

Where you upload information via our Website, the Est. Tenant Portal or the Apps, by the very act of your upload you consent to us keeping your personal information for the purposes of dealing with your inquiries and our supply of goods and services to you.

We will deal with any personal information collected via our website in accordance with this Privacy Policy and the law.

We also collect data through our use of ‘cookies’, ‘beacons’ and other internet technologies.

Cookies are small data files which are stored on your device’s browser. Cookies are stored in order for your internet browser to navigate a website. Cookies will not identify you, but they do identify your internet service provider, browser type and browsing habits.

A web beacon is a technique used on web pages and emails to unobtrusively check that a user has accessed some content.

We will not use cookies or beacons to collect your identifying personal information. They may collect statistical information about your visit to our Website, the Est. Tenant Portal or the Apps (such as the pages you visit on the Website) in order to remember your preferences and allow you to navigate the Website, the Est. Tenant Portal or Apps more easily.

The default setting of most internet browsers is to accept cookies automatically, but you can choose whether to allow cookies through your browser settings. Please note that if you deactivate your cookies, you may have difficulty accessing or using our Website, Est. Tenant Portal and Apps.

We also collect your IP address to create an audit trail of events that take place on our Website, Est. Tenant Portal and Apps, and to track and aggregate non-identifiable information, your referring website addresses, browser type and access times.

Links

If we provide links through our Website, Est. Tenant Portal or Apps to third-party websites, add-ins, plug-ins and applications, those links are provided for convenience and may not remain current or be maintained.

Unless expressly stated otherwise, we are not responsible for the privacy practices of, or any content on, those linked websites, add-ins, plug-ins or applications, and have no control over or rights in those linked websites, add-ins, plug-ins or applications. The privacy policies that apply to those other websites, add-ins, plug-ins or applications may differ substantially from our Privacy Policy, so we encourage individuals to read them before using those websites, add-ins, plug-ins or applications.

Privacy related questions and complaints

We respect your privacy and we take all feedback, input, complaints and concerns regarding privacy very seriously.

If you have any questions about privacy-related issues, you would like to request access to or correction of your personal information, you would like further information about this Privacy Policy, or you have a concern or complaint your privacy or the handling of your personal information by us, you may lodge your question, concern or complaint in writing to us at:

The Est. Privacy Officer
249 Queens Parade, Fitzroy North
hello@estrentals.com.au
1800 ASK EST (1800 275 378)

Where you contact us, we will respond to you as soon as possible, but not later than 30 days from receipt of your question or complaint.

If you are not satisfied with our response, or if you do not wish to raise a question or complaint with us directly, you may wish to contact the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner at www.oaic.gov.au.

Updates to this Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. We will make the most current version of this Policy available on our website at http://www.estrentals.com.au/privacy-policy/.

Last updated on 13 August 2024