Privacy Policy

OWNperty is a technology-enabled real estate consulting and advisory company. We provide research, assessment and advice on property decisions — principally in Ghana — to clients wherever they live, including those managing property from abroad. We are the data controller for the information described here.

Pending legal review — Registered company name, company number, registered address, and the contact details of the data protection point of contact need to be inserted here.

We collect only what the service requires:

• Account details — name, email address, phone number, country of residence.
• Identity documents — where you complete verification: a national ID, passport or driving licence, plus proof of address if you are outside Ghana. We store the document reference and the file itself.
• Your requests — what you are looking for, budget, locations, timeline, and any details you add.
• Messages and files you exchange with our team or an assigned professional.
• Payment records — amounts, currency, and status. Card and mobile money details are handled entirely by our payment processors and never reach our systems.
• Enquiries — if you submit the enquiry form before registering, we keep what you send along with the IP address it came from.

We do not run analytics, advertising or tracking of any kind. There are no third-party trackers on this site.

One cookie, realco_session, which keeps you signed in. It is essential to the service, cannot be disabled while you are logged in, and is not used to track you. It lasts seven days for client accounts and eight hours for staff accounts.

• To provide the service you asked for — researching your request, assessing the opportunity, and keeping you updated.
• To verify identity, which we are obliged to do before connecting you to regulated professionals.
• To take payment and keep financial records.
• To keep an audit trail of actions taken on your data, which protects you as much as us.

Pending legal review — The lawful basis for each purpose under UK/EU GDPR — contract, legal obligation, or legitimate interest — should be stated explicitly and confirmed by counsel.

Your data is stored on Google Cloud infrastructure in the europe-west1 region (Belgium). It is encrypted in transit and at rest. Identity documents are held in restricted storage that only senior operations staff can access, and every access is logged.

Pending legal review — Hosting data for Ghanaian residents in the EU has implications under the Ghana Data Protection Act 2012 that need confirming, along with the transfer mechanism relied on for any movement of data between jurisdictions.

We use a small number of providers, each handling only what their function requires:

• Google Firebase — hosting, database, file storage, authentication.
• Stripe — card payments in pounds, dollars and euros. They receive your email and the amount; we never see or store your card details.
• Paystack — mobile money and card payments in Ghana cedis. They receive your email and the amount, and the payment details you enter go to them, not to us.
• Resend — sending email notifications. They receive your email address and the message content.
• Frankfurter — published exchange rates. No personal data is sent.

We do not sell your data, and we do not share it for marketing.

Pending legal review — Data processing agreements with each provider should be in place and referenced, and this list kept current as providers change.

• Files shared in messages — deleted automatically 90 days after a request is cancelled. While a request is open or completed, they stay with it.
• Audit records — retained for at least a year, as a tamper-resistant log. These survive account deletion, with your identity removed from them.
• Financial records — retained after deletion, with your identity removed, because we are required to keep a record of money taken and refunded.

Where we are not yet where we want to be: documents you attach to a request, and identity documents, have no automatic expiry today. They are removed when you delete your account, and on request. We would rather say that than publish a retention period nothing enforces.

Pending legal review — Retention for account records, identity documents and financial records after an account closes needs to be fixed by counsel, and is likely driven by anti-money- laundering and tax obligations rather than by preference. Once fixed, it needs a job that enforces it, not only a stated period.

You can ask for a copy of your data, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it. All three can be done from the Account page once you are signed in.

Getting a copy is immediate — we hold the data and it is yours, so there is nothing to schedule. The export covers your account, your requests, your messages and your payment records. Identity documents are described but not included: they are files you supplied and already hold, and putting them in a downloadable bundle creates a copy nobody needs.

Deletion happens when you ask, not on a queue. It destroys the identity behind the record: your name, contact details, identity documents and message content. It does not destroy financial and audit records, which we are required to keep — those are retained with your identity stripped out of them.

We will refuse a deletion in two situations, and tell you which: you have work in progress with us, or there is money that has moved and not settled either way. In both cases erasing the identity would leave something — a live engagement, or a refund owed to nobody — that cannot then be put right. Close the work or let the refund complete, and the deletion goes through.

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your data, you can complain to your local supervisory authority — the Data Protection Commission in Ghana, or the ICO in the UK. You do not need to exhaust our process first.

Email support@ownperty.com with any question about your data, and we will respond within 30 days. Our contact page sets out the escalation route if you need one.