Privacy notice
Version 1.0 · Effective 1 September 2026
1. About this notice
Houself Limited ("Houself", "we", "us", "our") provides tenancy management software to landlords and letting agents. We take privacy seriously and only use personal data in the ways described here.
Before reading on, it helps to know that there are two different roles an organisation can have when it handles personal data.
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When we decide to collect personal data about you, and decide what to do with it, we are responsible for it. The law calls this being the data controller.
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When a landlord or letting agent uses Houself to manage their tenancies, they decide what information about tenants, applicants, guarantors and contractors goes into the system, and why. They are responsible for that data. We simply act on their instructions. The law calls this being the data processor.
This notice covers only the personal data we control, which is the data we collect through our website, our newsletter, our customer accounts, and our own marketing and research.
If you are a tenant, an applicant for a tenancy, a guarantor or a contractor, this is not the notice that applies to you. Your landlord or letting agent is responsible for your data, and it is their privacy notice you need. Any request about your data should go to them. If you contact us instead we will point you in the right direction, but we cannot deal with the request ourselves.
2. Who we are and how to contact us
Houself Limited is registered in England and Wales, company number 17389835. Our registered office is 167–169 Great Portland Street, London W1W 5PF.
We are registered with the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) as a data controller. Our registration number is ZC230203.
If you have any questions about this notice, you can contact us here:
What your enquiry is about
General privacy questions
Email us at
help@houself.co.uk
What your enquiry is about
Exercising your data protection rights, or making a data protection complaint
Email us at
privacy@houself.co.uk
3. What we collect, why, and our legal basis
Most of the personal data we hold comes directly from you, for example, when you sign up to our newsletter, interact with our marketing website, or ask us a question; or when you create an account on our service website or purchase services from us.
We may also obtain some data from elsewhere:
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from your employer or a colleague, if they set up a Houself account on your behalf;
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from public sources such as Companies House, the ICO and FCA registers, Council HMO listings, property listings and company websites;
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from our payment provider, about the status of a payment.
Anyone handling personal data needs a lawful reason for doing so. Ours are:
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Consent — you have told us we can, and you can change your mind at any time.
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Contract — we need the data in order to give you the service you have signed up for. Where this is the basis, we cannot provide the service without it.
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Legal obligation — the law requires us to keep the data or hand it over.
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Legitimate interests — we have a genuine business reason, and we have satisfied ourselves that using the data is fair to you and does not override your rights. Wherever we rely on this, you can object (see section 11).
3.1 Visitors to our marketing and service websites
What we collect
Your IP address, device and browser type, the pages you viewed, the site you came from, and your approximate location worked out from your IP address
Why we collect it
To run the websites, keep them secure, and diagnose faults
Our legal basis
Legitimate interests — keeping a working, secure website
3.2 Newsletter subscribers
What we collect
Your name, email address, the organisation you give us, and the date and source of your sign-up
Why we collect it
To send you the Houself newsletter and product updates
Our legal basis
Consent. If you are already a customer we may instead rely on the "soft opt-in" rule, which lets us email you about similar products
What we collect
Whether you opened an email from us or clicked a link in it
Why we collect it
To see whether our emails are useful
Every email carries an unsubscribe link, and you can also just ask us to stop. Stopping does not affect anything we did beforehand.
3.3 Account holders — landlords, letting agents and their staff
What we collect
Your name, business email address, telephone number, job title and employer
Why we collect it
To set up and run your account
What we collect
Your business email address, and whatever you use to prove it is you (see below for passwords or using your Google account to sign in i.e. Gmail and a reference to approve login), login history
Why we collect it
To let you log in, and to stop anyone else getting into your account
What we collect
Billing name and address, VAT details, and your subscription and payment records. Card payments are handled by our payment provider — we do not see or store your full card number
Why we collect it
To take payment, and to keep the accounting records the law requires
Our legal basis
Contract, and legal obligation for the accounting records
What we collect
Support tickets, correspondence and notes of calls
Why we collect it
To answer your questions and improve the help we give
Our legal basis
Contract, and legitimate interests in running a good support service
What we collect
Login records, IP addresses, and audit trails of what was done in your account
Why we collect it
To keep accounts secure, prevent fraud, and show who did what
Our legal basis
Legitimate interests — security and accountability
What we collect
Usage statistics, which we combine and strip of anything identifying
Why we collect it
To improve the product and decide what to build next
Our legal basis
Legitimate interests — improving our service
3.4 Enquiries, demonstrations, pilots and research participants
What we collect
Your name, business contact details, organisation, and what you asked us
Why we collect it
To reply to you, and to follow up about Houself where that is what you wanted
Our legal basis
Legitimate interests — responding to people who contact us
What we collect
Notes, recordings or transcripts from research sessions and feedback groups
Why we collect it
To design and improve the product
What we collect
Records of the eligibility and conflict-of-interest checks we run for research panels
Why we collect it
To run our research fairly
Our legal basis
Legitimate interests — fair and credible research
3.5 Landlords and letting agents we approach
We look for landlords, letting agents and property businesses who might benefit from Houself, using information that has already been published.
What we collect
Business contact details e.g. name, job title, employer, business email address and telephone number, together with publicly listed information about the properties a business manages, and a note of where we found it
Why we collect it
To work out who to approach, and to contact them about Houself
Our legal basis
Legitimate interests — finding customers for our business
We only use sources that are open to the public, such as Companies House, industry and regulatory registers, business websites and property listings. We do not buy marketing lists.
If you would rather we did not contact you, please email us at privacy@houself.co.uk. We will remove you from our mailing lists and also keep a note of your email address for the sole purpose of making sure we do not contact you again. Every marketing email we send also carries an unsubscribe link.
4.7 Newsletter subscribers
If you give us your email address through the subscribe form on our website, we store that address, the date you subscribed, and a note of which version of the sign-up wording you were shown. You do not need a Houself account to subscribe, and we use a subscriber's address only to send the newsletter.
Lawful basis: consent (UK GDPR Art 6(1)(a)). You can withdraw it at any time using the unsubscribe link in any newsletter we send, or by contacting us (section 10). Withdrawing consent does not affect newsletters sent before you withdrew it.
4. Keeping your account secure
You can sign in to Houself in more than one way, and each one means we hold data in a different form:
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Email plus 6-digit login code. We email you a single-use code to login, which we hold for only 15 minutes.
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Sign in with Google. You type your Google password into Google, not into our site. Google then confirms to us that it is you, and passes us your name, your email address and a reference number for your Google account. We never receive your Google password (i.e. we do not hold this as personal data). This is all we ask Google for, so we have no access to your Gmail, your Calendar or your Drive. Google will know that you have a Houself account, and what Google does with that is covered by Google's own privacy policy rather than this one. You can disconnect Houself from your Google account at any time in your Google account settings.
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Password. Where you choose to use a password, we keep a scrambled version of this rather than in a readable form (i.e. we do not hold this as personal data).
Whichever you choose, we keep a record of when your account was signed into and from where, as set out in the table above, so that we (and you) can spot anything that looks wrong.
Data we do not collect
We do not ask for, and do not need, sensitive personal data (this is information about your health, ethnicity, religion or beliefs, or biometric data used to identify you) or information about criminal offences, from our website visitors, newsletter subscribers, account holders or research participants.
Our customers may hold data of this kind inside their own Houself accounts, for example Right to Rent identity evidence, or the result of a sanctions check. Where they do, they are responsible for it, not us.
5. Cookies
We use only the cookies our website needs in order to work. Cookies like these do not require your consent, which is why you will not see a cookie banner on our site. We tell you about them here and in our
cookie notice, and you can object to them at any time by emailing privacy@houself.co.uk.
We do not use advertising cookies, and we do not track you across other websites.
6. Who we share your data with
We do not sell personal data, and we do not share it with anyone else for their own marketing.
We share it only where we need to in order to run the business, with:
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the companies that host our systems, infrastructure and data source lookups;
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our payment and subscription billing providers;
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the platforms we use to send email, run the newsletter and handle support;
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our professional advisers — accountants, auditors, lawyers and insurers;
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a buyer or investor and their advisers, if we sell or reorganise the business.
We may also have to disclose personal data because the law requires it, for example to comply with a court order, a formal notice from a regulator, a request from law enforcement, or in connection with legal proceedings.
Where we use a third party organisation to handle personal data on our behalf, we check them carefully, satisfy ourselves that they will protect it properly, and put a written contract in place requiring them to act only on our instructions and to keep it confidential.
Signing in with Google is different. Google is not acting on our behalf when it does this — it makes its own decisions about the data it holds, and its own privacy policy applies to that. Section 3.3 sets out exactly what passes between Google and us.
7. Sending data outside the UK
We hold our data in the UK. Some of our suppliers are based elsewhere, or store or access data outside the UK. Where that happens we make sure the transfer is covered by the safeguards UK law requires, so that your data keeps the same protection it would have here.
8. How long we keep personal data
We keep personal data only for as long as we need it — to provide the service you asked for, or to meet a legal, tax or accounting obligation. In practice that means we keep it while you are a subscriber, a customer or a contact of ours, and then for a further period fixed by whichever legal duty applies.
When we no longer need it we either delete it, or strip out everything that identifies you so that it stops being personal data. Where that cannot be done straight away, for example, because the data sits in a backup, we keep it securely until it can be.
We keep a retention schedule setting out the periods for each type of data. We will tell you what applies to you if you contact us.
9. How we keep personal data secure
We protect personal data against loss, and against being accessed or used by anyone who should not have it. The marketing website is a separate entity to the service website.
10. Automated decisions
We do not use the personal data we control to make decisions about you by automated means alone, where those decisions would have a legal effect on you or affect you in a similarly significant way.
11. Your rights
Under UK data protection law you have the following rights over the personal data we control.
What it means
To be told how we use your personal data. We do that through this notice, and through anything else we tell you at the point we collect it.
What it means
To ask for a copy of your personal data. Some exemptions apply, so you may not always receive everything we hold.
Your right
To rectification
What it means
To ask us to correct data you think is wrong, and to fill in data you think is incomplete.
What it means
To ask us to delete your personal data, in certain circumstances.
Your right
To restrict processing
What it means
To ask us to limit what we do with your personal data, in certain circumstances.
Your right
To data portability
What it means
To ask us to give you, or send to another organisation, the data you gave us — in a form a computer can read. This applies only where we hold the data electronically on the basis of your consent or a contract.
What it means
To object to anything we do on the basis of our legitimate interests. You can always object to direct marketing, and we will stop.
Your right
To withdraw consent
What it means
Where we rely on your consent, to take it back at any time. This does not affect anything we did before you withdrew it.
Using your rights
The two most common requests are the simplest:
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to stop newsletter or marketing emails you can use the unsubscribe link at the bottom of any of them, or email us;
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to correct something we hold about you, such as a misspelt name — just tell us.
For anything else, email privacy@houself.co.uk and tell us what you want.
What happens next
We will normally reply within one month. If your request is complicated, or you have made several, we can take up to two further months. We will tell you within the first month if that is going to happen, and why. If we need more information from you before we can identify you or find what you have asked for, we may pause the clock until you send it. We carry out a search that is reasonable and proportionate to what you have asked for. There is no charge for this service.
If your request is about data we hold on behalf of a landlord or letting agent, you will need to go to them instead (see section 1).
12. How to complain
To us. If you are unhappy with the way we have handled your personal data, tell us at privacy@houself.co.uk. There is no form to fill in and no particular wording you need to use. We will:
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acknowledge your complaint within 30 days of receiving it;
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look into it properly and keep you posted on how it is going;
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tell you the outcome in plain language and without undue delay — normally within three months of acknowledging it; and
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tell you how to take the matter further if you are still unhappy.
To the Information Commissioner. You can complain to the ICO at any time, whether or not you have come to us first. We would rather you gave us the chance to put things right, but that is your choice, and complaining to us takes nothing away from your right to go to the ICO. Their address is:
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Information Commissioner's Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire SK9 5AF
13. Changes to this notice
We keep this notice under review so that it stays accurate. Where we make a significant change we will update the version number and the effective date at the top, and we will email account holders before the change takes effect.
Summary of change
Initial issue