The realcommercial.com.au, realestate.com.au and property.com.au websites ("our websites") are operated by realestate.com.au Pty Ltd ("REA"). REA is a subsidiary of REA Group Ltd and operates our websites on behalf of REA Group Ltd and its related companies ("we", "our" and "us" in this Privacy Policy). Click here to view our contact details.
The Privacy Policy set out below outlines the manner in which we manage personal information obtained through or displayed on our websites or otherwise provided by real estate agents or visitors to the website. By using our websites, or entering into an agreement with us in relation to our websites or any of our other websites (eg to list a property or advertise on any of our websites) you are taken to have read, and agreed to the collection, use, disclosure and handling of your personal information in accordance with, this Privacy Policy. This Privacy Policy is in addition to any other terms and conditions applicable to our websites. Specific privacy terms contained in any documents made available by us should be read together with this Privacy Policy.
We reserve the right, at our discretion, to modify or remove portions of this Privacy Policy at any time. You should review this Privacy Policy periodically so that you are updated on any changes. We welcome your comments and feedback.
We do not make any representations about third party websites that may be linked to any of our websites.
We recognise the importance of protecting the privacy of information we collect that is capable of identifying an individual ("personal information").
In collecting and handling personal information, we are bound by the Commonwealth Privacy Act 1988, including the National Privacy Principles, and any other applicable privacy laws in Australia. This Privacy Policy governs the manner in which personal information will be dealt with.
There may be circumstances in which we need to transfer personal information outside Australia. If we do so, we strive to ensure that any organisation to which the information is transferred will be subject to binding privacy obligations.
If we become aware of any ongoing concerns or problems with our websites, we will take these issues seriously and work to address these concerns. If you have any further queries relating to this Privacy Policy, or you have a problem or complaint, please contact us.
For more information about privacy issues in Australia and protecting your privacy, visit the Australian Federal Privacy Commissioner's website.
In order to provide you with services, answer your enquiries, deal with your requests or improve the services we offer you, we may collect and process the following personal information about you:
If we do not collect this personal information from you, we may not be able to provide you with the services or assistance you have requested.
We may use personal information in the following ways:
You should be aware that submitting an enquiry regarding a property or an estate agent through our websites will result in the information being passed to the estate agent. What they then do with your information will be their responsibility. You will need to see the estate agent's privacy policy to find out how that estate agent handles your personal information. We are not responsible for the way estate agents collect, use, disclose or handle personal information.
We may disclose information held about you to the following types of organisations:
We also disclose real estate agent contact details (which may include a profile photo) in association with listings or advertisements on our websites.
We strive to ensure the security, integrity and privacy of personal information submitted to our websites, and we review and update our security measures in light of current technologies. Unfortunately, no data transmission over the internet can be guaranteed to be totally secure.
However, we will endeavour to take reasonable steps to protect the personal information you may transmit to us or from our online products and services. Once we do receive your transmission, we will also use reasonable endeavours to ensure its security on our systems.
In addition, our employees and the contractors who provide services related to our information systems are obliged to respect the confidentiality of any personal information held by us. However, we are not responsible for events arising from unauthorised access to your personal information.
Data (including personal data) submitted by REA’s customers and visitors to our websites may be held on servers located in Australia or in the data centres of REA’s outsourced data processors with data centres in Australia, the United States of America, Europe and Asia. The purposes of transfer of data outside of Australia are the secure storage, back-up and retrieval of data. REA has implemented policies and procedures to safeguard the secure storage and processing of data intra-group, has verified the security arrangements of its outsourced data processors and has implemented contractual arrangements intra-group and with its outsourced data processors in accordance with Privacy Act 1988 . You give consent to the transfer of personal data on these terms and for the purposes described above.
We will endeavour to take all reasonable steps to keep accurate and up to date any information which we hold about you. If, at any time, you discover that information held about you is incorrect, you contact us to have the information corrected.
You can also gain access to the personal information we hold about you, subject to certain exceptions provided for by law. To request access to your personal information, please contact us.
Cookies are data that a website transfers to an individual's hard drive for record-keeping purposes. Cookies, which are industry standard and are used by most websites, including our websites, can facilitate a user's ongoing access to and use of a site.
All pages on our websites are coded with measurement software which is transparent to the user. The software makes use of an invisible image at the bottom of the web page. This software stores a "cookie" in the browser, which contains a unique string. This information is collected and aggregated, and in no way does this unique identifier identify a user personally. Cookies allow us to:
We use the independent companies, including Nielsen/NetRatings and Omniture to measure and analyse the internet usage across our web sites. We also use an auditing system on our website in relation to internet usage measurement and/or analytics.
We are a signatory to the Australian Best Practice Guideline for Online Behavioural Advertising. These Guidelines set out seven principles that must be followed when engaging in online behavioural (also known as interests based) advertising. You can view a copy of the Guidelines at the Australian Direct Marketing Association’s website www.adma.com.au.
When you visit any of these the realestate.com.au network of Australian sites (including this website, mobile sites and other websites with the realestate.com.au, realcommercial.com.au and realbusinesses.com.au header and/or footer), and the sites of our advertising partners (which may include third party websites), we may place one or more cookies on your computer in order to recognise your computer each time you visit these sites and/or are displayed advertising. These cookies allow us to collect certain information about your web browsing behaviour in order to select what advertisements to display to you and to determine the effectiveness of the advertisements. We use the information collected from your web browsing behaviour to make assumptions about your characteristics and the things you are interested in, and then display targeted advertising that we believe may be of interest to you. For example, we may select the advertisements we display based on certain interest categories that we have inferred based on:
We also allow other ad serving networks to display advertisements the realestate.com.au network of Australian sites. In these instances code in our web pages direct our ad serving platform to call the advertisement from one of our ad serving networks. The companies in this network may also participate in behavioural advertising.
We do not marry any information collected via cookies with any of your personal information for the purposes of behavioural advertising. The cookies used by us for behavioural advertising have an expiry date of no more than 2 years.
If you do not want information collected through the use of cookies, there is a simple procedure in most browsers that allows you to deny or accept the cookie feature. However, you should note that some cookies are necessary to provide you with essential features of our online services and therefore may not be disabled without disabling the entire services.
If you do not want cookies to be used for behavioural advertising then you may control your advertising preferences via the REA Group opt out tool. For more information on your advertising choices, and how to use the REA Group opt out tool, please visit www.youronlinechoices.com.au. Here you can opt out of behavioural advertising for realestate.com.au and a number of other sites who are also signatories to the Australian Best Practice Guideline for Online Behavioural Advertising. When you opt out of behavioural advertising for realestate.com.au you are opted out of this form of advertising across the realestate.com.au network of Australian sites and advertising served by us on the sites of our advertising partners. If you opt out you can always opt in again at a later date via www.youronlinechoices.com.au.
We provide links to websites outside of our websites, as well as to third party websites. These linked sites are not under our control, and we cannot accept responsibility for the conduct of companies linked to our websites. Before disclosing your personal information on any other website, we advise you to examine the terms and conditions of using that website and its privacy statement.
If you apply to us for credit, we will ask you to authorise us to obtain personal information about you from credit reporting agencies, other credit providers, existing or previous suppliers of goods or services, your bank and certain other businesses for the purposes of assessing your application.
We will also require you to authorise us to disclose your personal information to:
In addition to the ways in which we may use personal information set out above, if you are a customer of REA, we may also use your personal information:
Published September 2012