Privacy Policy

We are Hopkins Homes Limited (company registration number 02875798) and our registered office is Hopkins Homes, 1st and 2nd Floor, Blenheim House, Newmarket Road, Bury St Edmunds, IP33 3SB

Hopkins Homes Limited act as data controllers and are referred to as “Hopkins Homes”, “we” or “us” in this policy.

Tilia Homes Limited (company registration number 775505) and Untypical Limited (registration number 68992) are referred to as the “Group ” in this policy.

You can contact us in writing at Hopkins Homes, 1st and 2nd Floor, Blenheim House, Newmarket Road, Bury St Edmunds, IP33 3SB or by emailing compliance@hopkinshomes.co.uk.  If you would like to speak to us, please call us on 01394 446800.

We are registered with the UK supervisory authority, Information Commissioner’s Office (“ICO”), in relation to our processing of Personal Data under registration number Z7953748.

We have appointed a data protection officer who acts as our primary point of contact for any questions or concerns you may have regarding our handling of your personal data. You can contact our data protection officer using the detail set out in the Who we are and how you can contact us section.  Please mark your correspondence “FAO Data Protection Officer”.

Our Data Protection Officer

compliance@hopkinshomes.co.uk

The types of personal information we collect and our uses of that personal information will depend on your relationship with us. For example, we will collect different personal information depending on whether you are a client, supplier, industry contact or website user.

We collect:

• personal data that you provide to us.  You may share your personal data with us when you enquire about our properties or when you contact us about a property you are in the process of buying or have already bought. The personal data that you provide to us may include your name, address, e-mail address and phone number, details of your household and professional advisors and other details that may be relevant to your property purchase.
• personal data that we receive from third parties.  We may receive personal data about you from our Group companies or other companies that we engage with in relation to your property purchase or that we contract to help us maintain your property.  For example, we may receive details concerning a mortgage you obtain to fund your property purchase or information regarding the sale of another property you currently own from your mortgage broker, estate agent or solicitor (or from professional advisors acting for another party in the same chain) or we may receive feedback from our specialist contractors that we instruct to make repairs or alterations to your property.
• personal data about your use of our website.  This is technical information and includes details such as your IP address, browser type and version, time zone setting, browser plug-in types and versions, operating system and platform, as well as details of how you navigated to our website and where you went when you left, what pages or properties you viewed or searched for, page response times, download errors, length of visits to certain pages, page interaction information (such as scrolling, clicks, and mouse-overs), and any phone number used to call our customer service number.

We use your personal data in the following ways:

• personal data that you provide to us is used to:
  • provide you with the information that you request from us and handle your property purchase
  • provide you with marketing information in accordance with your marketing preferences (see How we use your personal data for marketing)
  • manage and administer our business
  • manage and administer the business of the Group companies
  • review and improve our business operations including reports to investors, shareholders and controlling parties of Us and the wider Group
  • review and improve our properties
  • review and improve our customer service experience
• personal data that we receive from third parties is combined with the personal data that you provide to us and used for the purposes described above.
• personal data about your use of our website is used to:
  • administer our website and for internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research, statistical and survey purposes
  • to improve our website to ensure that content is presented in the most effective manner for you and for your computer or mobile device
  • as part of our efforts to keep our site safe and secure
  • to measure or understand the effectiveness of advertising we serve to you and others, and to deliver relevant advertising to you
  • to make suggestions and recommendations to you about our properties and developments that may interest you

Our website uses cookies to distinguish you from other users of our website. This helps us to provide you with a good experience when you browse our website and also allows us to improve our website. For detailed information on the cookies we use, and the purposes for which we use them see our cookie policy.

Whilst we always want you to be aware of how we are using your personal data, this does not necessarily mean that we are required to ask for your consent before we can use it.  In the day to day running of our business we may use your personal data without asking for your consent because:

• we are entering into and carrying out our obligations under a contract with you
• we need to use your personal data for our own legitimate purposes (such as the administration and management of our business and the improvement of our customer service) and our doing so will not interfere with your privacy rights
• we need to use your personal data for our Group’s legitimate purposes (such as the administration and management of the Group’s business) and our doing so will not interfere with your privacy rights
• we are subject to legal obligations that require us to use your personal data in certain ways (such as disclosing information to HM Revenue & Customs)

The most common situation in which we will process your personal data on the grounds of consent is where we wish to send marketing communications to you. Please refer to the section on How we use your personal data for marketing to read about our marketing practices.

In exceptional circumstances we may wish to use your personal data for a different purpose which does require your consent.  In these circumstances we will contact you to explain how we wish to use your data and to ask for your consent.

You are not required to give consent just because we ask for it.  If you do give consent, you can change your mind and withdraw it at a later date.

To help you better understand the legal grounds we rely on for different types of processing, we have set out an overview of the main processing activities we undertake and the relevant legal grounds below:

You are not under a legal obligation to provide us with any of your personal data but please note that if you elect not to provide us with your personal data, we may be unable to proceed with a property purchase.

We do not make use of automated decision making or profiling.

We share your data with the following people in the day to day running our business:

• the business partners, suppliers and sub-contractors we work with to enable you property purchase and to assist in dealing with any snagging issues following your purchase:
  • legal service providers who assist us in relation to your conveyance
  • accountancy service providers who advise us in relation to the general management and administration of our business
  • building contractors who may deal with snagging issues
  • our building warranty provider, NHBC. For more information about NHBC, please read their Privacy Notice at http://www.nhbc.co.uk/Legal/PrivacyPolicy/
  • our emergency out of hours customer support provider, Careline UK Monitoring Ltd. For more information about Careline UK Monitoring Limited, please read their Privacy Notice at https://www.appello.co.uk/privacy-statement
  • utility service providers who provide essential utilities and services to your property
  • financial service providers who administer agreements on our behalf e.g. shared equity loans
  • IT support providers who keep our internal systems and networks running smoothly
  • analytics, search engine providers and feedback engines that assist us in the improvement and optimisation of our site
  • HM Revenue & Customs
• The Group companies to enable proper business administration and management
• Third parties involved in the administration, structuring and management of our business including investors, shareholders and controlling parties to enable appropriate business oversight

We may also share your personal information with third parties on a one-off basis, for example, if:

• we sell or buy any business or assets (including our own), in which case we will disclose your personal data to the prospective seller or buyer of such business or assets.
• we are under a duty to disclose or share your personal data in order to comply with any legal obligation, or in order to enforce or apply our website terms of use or other agreements we may enter into with you; or to protect the rights, property, or safety of our customers, ourselves or others. This includes exchanging information with other companies and organisations for the purposes of fraud protection and credit risk reduction.

We take every care to ensure that your personal data is kept secure.  The security measures we take include:

• only storing your personal data on our secure servers
• using appropriate encryption technique’s including file encryption, point to point encryption and SSL and TLS
• ensuring that our staff receive regular data security awareness training
• keeping paper records to a minimum and ensuring that those we do have are stored in locked filing cabinets on our office premises
• maintaining up to date firewalls and anti-virus software to minimise the risk of unauthorised access to our systems
• enforcing a strict policy on the use of mobile devices and out of office working
• limiting access to data on a need to know basis
• adopting IT authentication

Unfortunately, sending information via the internet is not completely secure. Although we will do our best to protect your personal data, we cannot guarantee the security of personal data sent to our website; you send us personal data at your own risk. Once we have received your personal data, we will use strict procedures and security features (some of which are described above) to try to prevent unauthorised access.

We will add your details to our marketing database if:

• you have told a third party that you would like them to pass us your contact details so that we can send you updates about our properties
• you have specifically asked to receive marketing communications (i.e. you have “opted-in”)

We may contact you for marketing purposes by email, telephone and post.

You can ask us to only send you marketing communications by particular methods (for example, you may be happy to receive emails from us but not telephone calls), about particular types of properties or developments in specific locations or you may ask us not to send you any marketing communications at all.

You can check and update your current marketing preferences at any time by calling or emailing us using the details set out in the Who we are and how you can contact us section above.

You can opt out of receiving our marketing communications at any time by following the unsubscribe instructions you will find in each marketing communication or by contacting us at any time using the details in the Who we are and how you can contact us section above.

We never share your personal data with third parties for marketing purposes.

Your Personal Data may be shared or processed outside of the UK for the purposes mentioned in this privacy policy including to Group companies in Guernsey.

Where we do so we will take appropriate steps to ensure that the Personal Data processed outside the UK has an essentially equivalent level of protection to that guaranteed in the UK. We do this by ensuring that:

• Your Personal Data is only processed in a country which the Secretary of State has confirmed has an adequate level of protection (an adequacy regulation), or
• We enter into an International Data Transfer Agreement (“IDTA”) with the receiving organisation and adopt supplementary measures, where necessary. (A copy of the IDTA can be found here international-data-transfer-agreement.pdf (ico.org.uk)).

We only keep your personal data for as long as we actually need it.  In practice this means that we will keep:

• your name and contact details for marketing purposes until you tell us you no longer wish to receive our marketing communications or until we are notified that the contact details we hold are no longer current
• a record of property purchase (including a copy of your conveyance records and details of any aftercare services) for 11 years from property purchase.
• complaint records for 11 years from property purchase.

Please note that we may anonymise your personal data or use it for statistical purposes. We keep anonymised and statistical data indefinitely, but we take care to ensure that such data can no longer identify or be connected to any individual.

If you have any questions about our data retention practices, please contact data protection officer (see the section on Our data protection officer for contact details).

You have certain rights in relation to the processing of your Personal Data, including to:

• Right to be informed
  You have the right to know what personal data we collect about you, how we use it, for what purpose and in accordance with which lawful basis, who we share it with and how long we keep it. We use our privacy notice to explain this.
• Right of access (commonly known as a “Subject Access Request”)
  You have the right to receive a copy of the Personal Data we hold about you.
• Right to rectification
  You have the right to have any incomplete or inaccurate information we hold about you corrected.
• Right to erasure (commonly known as the right to be forgotten)
  You have the right to ask us to delete your Personal Data.
• Right to object to processing
  You have the right to object to us processing your Personal Data. If you object to us using your Personal Data for marketing purposes, we will stop sending you marketing material.
• Right to restrict processing
  You have the right to restrict our use of your Personal Data.
• Right to portability
  You have the right to ask us to transfer your Personal Data to another party.
• Automated decision-making. You have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing which will significantly affect you. We do not use automated decision-making.
• Right to withdraw consent
  If you have provided your consent for us to process your Personal Data for a specific purpose, you have the right to withdraw your consent at any time. If you do withdraw your consent, we will no longer process your information for the purpose(s) you originally agreed to, unless we are permitted by law to do so.
• Right to lodge a complaint
  You have the right to lodge a complaint with the relevant supervisory authority, if you are concerned about the way in which we are handling your Personal Data. The supervisory authority in the UK is the Information Commissioner’s Office who can be contacted online at:
  Contact us | ICO
  Or by telephone on 0303 123 1113
  For supervisory authorities in other countries within the EU see the link below:
  https://edpb.europa.eu/about-edpb/about-edpb/members_en

How to exercise your rights

You will not usually need to pay a fee to exercise any of the above rights. However, we may charge a reasonable fee if your request is clearly unfounded or excessive. Alternatively, we may refuse to comply with the request in such circumstances.

If you wish to exercise your rights, you may contact us using the details set out below within the section called ‘How to contact us and our Data Protection Officer’. We may need to request specific information from you to confirm your identity before we can process your request. Once in receipt of this, we will process your request without undue delay and within one month. In some cases, such as with complex requests, it may take us longer than this and, if so, we will keep you updated.

We will review and update this policy from time to time. This may be to reflect a change in the goods or services we offer or to our internal procedures or it may be to reflect a change in the law.

The easiest way to check for updates is by looking for the latest version of this policy on our website or you can contact us (see Who we are and how to contact us) to ask us to send you the latest version of our policy.

Each time we update our policy we will update the policy version number shown at the end of the policy and the date on which that version of the policy came into force.

This is policy version V1.6 which came into effect on 1 October 2024.