When you chat with the assistant on an estate agency's website, that agency is the data controller — they decide why your details are collected. Hovio provides the software and processes the information on their instructions.
The assistant is software, not a person. It answers from the property details the agency has given it and can book viewings. It will hand you to a human agent for anything involving offers, negotiation, or advice on mortgages, tax or law.
The assistant asks only for what it needs to answer you or arrange a viewing. You are free to browse and ask questions without giving any personal details at all.
To answer property enquiries and arrange viewings — a legitimate interest of the agency in responding to people who contact them, and where you ask for a viewing, steps taken at your request before entering a contract.
What you type is not used to train any AI model. Anthropic does not train on data sent through its API, and we do not use your conversations to improve the assistant.
Your details are never sold, and never shared with other agencies. Each agency can only ever see its own enquiries.
Records are stored in the United Kingdom (London region). Conversations and enquiry records are kept while the agency needs them to deal with your enquiry, and deleted when they no longer do.
Writing a reply means sending the conversation to the AI provider in the United States, and an alert email goes through a provider there too. Those are the only times anything leaves the UK.
Hovio sets no advertising or analytics cookies, and there is nothing here to track you across other websites. The chat keeps one identifier for the current tab, so the assistant does not lose the thread when you scroll or navigate; it is discarded when you close the tab. The site also remembers your language choice. Both are necessary for the thing you asked for to work, so neither asks for consent.
The assistant books viewings and records enquiries. It does not decide whether you can buy or rent anything, does not score you for any decision with a legal effect, and does not negotiate — those are handed to a person at the agency.
You can ask for a copy of what is held about you, ask for it to be corrected or deleted, or object to it being used. Contact the estate agency you spoke to. If you are not satisfied, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office.
Every agency's data is isolated at the database level, so one agency's records cannot be read by another. Connections are encrypted. The AI provider's credentials are held server-side and are never exposed to the websites the assistant runs on.
Agencies using Hovio: see the terms of service and the data processing agreement.
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