Privacy & Cookies

There are several reasons as to why we may collect your personal data. These reasons include:

• To comply with any legal obligation we have
• To comply with our duties and exercise our rights under a contract with you
• To pursue our legitimate interests (as set out below); or
• Where you have consented to the processing of your data

This includes, but is not limited to, information you (or a joint purchaser and/or owner) provide:

• When you/they contact us in persona, on our website, over the telephone, by e-mail or by post
• At the time of reserving a home to purchase from us
• At the time of purchasing options and extras from us
• During purchasing a home from us and/or selling a home to us in part exchange
• When you apply for a job vacancy with us

It is necessary for the legitimate interests of Thirteen Homes to process customer data in the following circumstances:

• Selling and supplying our homes and services
• Protecting customers, employees and other individuals including their health, safety and welfare
• Promoting, marketing and advertising our products and services
• Sending promotional communications which are relevant and tailored to individual customers
• Understanding our customers’ behaviour, activities, preferences and needs
• Improving existing products and services/developing new products and services
• Complying with our legal and regulatory obligations
• Preventing, investigating and detecting crime, fraud or anti-social behaviour and prosecuting offenders, including working with law enforcement agencies
• Handling customer contacts, queries and disputes
• Protecting Thirteen Homes, it’s employees and customers by taking appropriate legal action against third parties who have committed criminal acts or are in breach of legal obligations to Thirteen Homes

Thirteen Homes take your privacy very seriously and unless we are obligated to do so by law, we will never share your personal data without your knowledge.  The data you share with us will only be retained for the purposes described in this privacy notice and we will only retain it for as long as is necessary.

Below we have listed examples of when we would collect, process and in some cases share your personal data:

• to ensure that content from our website is presented in the most effective manner for you and for your computer/device
• to verify your identity
• to process job applications
• to process and manage your purchase of a property from us and provide after sales service where applicable
• to carry out our obligations arising from any contracts entered between you and us, including for example your purchase of a home and/or options and extras from us and (if applicable) our purchase of your existing home in part exchange
• to facilitate the provision of warranties with a home purchased from us
• to monitor customer satisfaction (both on our own behalf and/or for the National house Building Council) including processing customer satisfaction surveys
• to notify utility suppliers and local authorities about your new home and about any home we have purchased from you in part exchange
• to provide you with information, products or services that you request from us
• to notify you about changes to our services
• to contact you about new developments and house types which may meet your needs. If you have not yet reserved a home with us we will contact you in this way only if you have consented to us using your personal data in this way and that you want to receive this information from us.

You are free to withdraw your consent for promotional offers and marketing at any time.

Under some laws and regulations, we are required to retain your personal data for a period of time i.e. for health and safety matters we are obliged to retain your data for up to 40 years. Where no legal obligation is in place, we will hold your data for two years, i.e. for direct marketing information, unless you opt out within this time.

• Health and Safety related matters – up to 40 years
• Property purchases and related matters – up to 15 years
• Direct marketing – up to 2 years
• Other data will be held for up to 6 years in line with the statue of limitations

Other than for the purposes specified in this privacy notice, we do not share or disclose any of your personal information without your consent, unless there is a legal requirement.

Where our trusted third parties require your data (listed below), they will also only process your data in accordance with this privacy policy, the data protection laws and any other appropriate confidentiality and security measures.

We may share your data with our third parties if:

• We are under a duty to disclose or share your personal data in order to comply with any legal obligation
• In order to apply or enforce our contracts with you
• To protect our rights, property or our safety and or the safety of our customers or others

In order to fulfil our contracts with you, we may also need to share your personal data with our suppliers and contractors in respect of:

• Any home you reserve from us
• The sale of the home and/or the purchase of your existing home in part exchange

Our trusted third parties may include:

• Estate and managing agents
• Financial and legal advisors
• Relevant mortgage providers
• NHBC (National House Building Council) and similar organisations
• Utility and service providers
• Local authorities

Using the information you have given to us directly, we will at times, tailor our communications with you using your preferred communications methods or via social media.  In addition, we may also use your information to target our digital marketing activity effectively. An example of this would be using the information you provided to us to display adverts to you or potential customers who have similar characteristics to you. Information we share with social media companies such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, will be shared in an encrypted format and will not be used for their own purposes.

As a reminder, you can stop any marketing activity including in any of the ways listed above by getting in touch with us using our contact details.

Your social media sites will also collect your information such as you age, location and website you have visited, because of this, you may still see adverts relating to Thirteen Homes, even after you have asked us not to use your information for digital advertising.

At any time, you have the right to access any personal information that we process about you and to request the information about:

• What personal data we hold about you
• The purposes of processing this data
• The categories of personal data concerned
• The recipients to whom the personal data has/will be disclosed to
• How long we intend to store your personal data for
• If we did not collect the data directly from you, information about the source

We strive to keep our data up to date and correct, therefore if find that the data we hold is incorrect or incomplete, you have the right to ask to us correct and/or complete the information.

Please note, you have the right to request:

• Your personal data to be erased from our records
• The use of your personal data to be restricted in accordance with data protection laws
• To opt out of any direct marketing from us
• To be informed about any automated decision-making that we use

To ensure that your data remains secure, if you need to request any of the above from us, we may ask you to verify your identity because carrying out the request.

If you would like to make a request around the processing of your personal data or if you have any further questions/require more information or want to contact our Data protection Officer please contact us at  Governance.Compliance@thirteengroup.co.uk

Cookies are text files containing small amounts of information which are downloaded to your device when you visit a website. Cookies are then sent back to the originating website on each subsequent visit, or to another website that recognises that cookie. Cookies are useful because they allow a website to recognise a user’s device. You can find more information about cookies at: www.allaboutcookies.org and www.youronlinechoices.eu. You can also see a video about cookies. 

Cookies do lots of different jobs, like letting you navigate between pages efficiently, remembering your preferences, and generally improve the user experience. They can also help to ensure that adverts you see online are more relevant to you and your interests. The cookies used on this website have been categorised based on the categories found in the ICC UK Cookie guide. A list of all the cookies used on this website by category is set out below.

All recent versions of popular browsers give users a level of control over cookies – for more information visit: www.aboutcookies.org

These cookies are essential to enable you to move around the website and use its features, such as accessing secure areas of the website. Without these cookies services you have asked for, like shopping baskets or e-billing, cannot be provided.

• NET Session ID - General purpose platform session cookie, used by sites written with Miscrosoft .NET based technologies. Usually used to maintain an anonymised user

• Request verification token - This is an anti-forgery cookie set by web applications built using ASP.NET MVC technologies. It is designed to stop unauthorised posting of content to a website, known as Cross-Site Request Forgery. It holds no information about the user and is destroyed on closing the browser.

These cookies collect information about how visitors use a website, for instance which pages visitors go to most often, and if they get error messages from web pages. These cookies don’t collect information that identifies a visitor. All information these cookies collect is aggregated and therefore anonymous. It is only used to improve how a website works.

• __ga – This cookie is associated with Google Universal Analytics - which is a significant update to Google's more commonly used analytics service. This cookie is used to distinguish unique users by assigning a randomly generated number as a client identifier. It is included in each page request in a site and used to calculate visitor, session and campaign data for the sites analytics.

• __gid - This cookie is set by Google Analytics. It stores and update a unique value for each page visited and is used to count and track pageviews.

These cookies are set, both by us, and some third parties (for example embedded video players) to provide critical website management data via Google Analytics. You can opt-out of Google Analytics across all websites.

These cookies allow the website to remember choices you make (such as your user name, language or the region you are in) and provide enhanced, more personal features. For instance, a website may be able to provide you with local weather reports or traffic news by storing in a cookie the region in which you are currently located. These cookies can also be used to remember changes you have made to text size, fonts and other parts of web pages that you can customise. They may also be used to provide services you have asked for such as watching a video or commenting on a blog. The information these cookies collect may be anonymised and they cannot track

• Persit and Recite.Preferences - only set if you use our accessibility and language tools feature

• _atuvc - This cookie is associated with the AddThis social sharing widget which is commonly embedded in websites to enable visitors to share content with a range of networking and sharing platforms. It stores an updated page share count.

• _atuvs - This cookie is associated with the AddThis social sharing widget which is commonly embedded in websites to enable visitors to share content with a range of networking and sharing platforms. This is believed to be a new cookie from AddThis which is not yet documented, but has been categorised on the assumption it serves a similar purpose to other cookies set by the service.

These cookies are used to deliver adverts more relevant to you and your interests. They are also used to limit the number of times you see an advertisement as well as help measure the effectiveness of the advertising campaign. They are usually placed by advertising networks with the website operator’s permission. They remember that you have visited a website and this information is shared with other organisations such as advertisers. Quite often targeting or advertising cookies will be linked to site functionality provided by the other organisation.

• _fbp - Used by Facebook to deliver a series of advertisement products such as real time bidding from third party advertisers.

• _gat_gtag_UA_158734250_1 - Used by Facebook to deliver a series of advertisement products such as real time bidding from third party advertisers.

• _uvc - Tracks how often a user interacts with AddThis.

Some of the content on this website is provided by third party services who also use cookies, these include:

• Share/Like/Follow Buttons – if you are logged into Twitter, Facebook or Google Plus, then they may be setting cookies when you visit this site. You can control this by logging out of those services or seeing if they have options to turn this off

• YouTube – embedded YouTube videos will set cookies. Where possible we have used enhanced privacy options which means this only happens when you watch a video.

If you complete an online form on our website, Google will capture your IP address.

Facebook log-in: if you log-in with Facebook, Facebook will store information in the browser identifying you, the detail of this information should be covered by Facebook’s cookie/privacy policy.

Google log-in: if you log-in with Google, Google will store information in the browser identifying you, the detail of this information should be covered by Google’s cookie/privacy policy.

Google Maps - Google will store cookies in-line with their cookie policy.

You can find the Facebook and Google cookie policies here:

• https://en-gb.facebook.com/policies/cookies/

• https://policies.google.com/technologies/cookies?hl=en-US

To ensure that your data remains secure, if you need to request any of the above from us, we may ask you to verify your identity because carrying out the request.