1. Controller
IBEX PROPERTIES SA, Via Serafino Balestra 6, 6830 Chiasso, Switzerland, is the controller for personal data processed via homehunt.ch. Contact for data-protection matters: privacy@homehunt.ch.
2. What we process and why
| Purpose | Data | Basis / justification (revFADP) |
|---|---|---|
| Provide search & display listings | Search terms, filters, technical/usage data | Necessary to provide the service / legitimate interest |
| Account, saved searches, email alerts | Name, email, password, saved searches, alert settings; when you create an account, the date and version of the Terms of use you accepted | Contract; alerts on your request |
| Paid listing plans and vouchers (Advertisers) | Account and agency details, billing email, plan, subscription status and renewal date, voucher redemptions. Card details are entered on Stripe's own checkout and never reach us | Contract; legal obligation (accounting) |
| Sponsored visibility purchases (Advertisers) | Account, listing, period bought, amount, payment status and Stripe's payment identifiers. Card details are entered on Stripe's own checkout and never reach us | Contract; legal obligation (accounting) |
| Enquiry / contact forms to Advertisers | Name, contact details, message, listing reference | Necessary to provide the service / legitimate interest |
| Counting unique visits to listings (statistics for Advertisers and the “In demand” indicator) | A one-way daily code computed from your IP address, your browser identifier and the listing. The IP address is not stored; see below | Legitimate interest (accurate statistics without bots or repeat counts) |
| Deal closure confirmation | Account and name from your inquiry, your answer and when it was given, review signals; see below | Legitimate interest (reliable closed-deal records, fraud prevention); contract for the Advertiser |
| Weekly summary emails to Advertisers | Account email and language, figures for the listings you manage (visits, inquiries, the “In demand” indicator) | Legitimate interest / contract; you can opt out at any time |
| In-platform notifications | The notification, what it concerns, when it was read and answered | Contract |
| Presenting homehunt.ch to property agencies | Business contact details an agency publishes itself: agency name, business address, email address, phone number, website and logo, the number of listings it advertises and their references, and the page each detail was taken from. Where an agency names a contact person in its own published business contact details, that person's name, business email address and business phone number. See below | Legitimate interest (introducing our service to businesses active on the Swiss property market, using contact details they publish for business inquiries) |
| Listings imported from other property portals | The listing as its advertiser published it (description, photos, price, address) and the advertiser's published name and business contact details | Legitimate interest (a complete marketplace); the advertiser may ask us to remove the listing or its details at any time |
| Security and service logs | For each request: time, page address, response status and duration, account id if signed in, IP address, browser identifier, referring page. Sign-ins, failed sign-ins and sign-outs with the username entered, IP address and browser identifier | Legitimate interest (operating, securing and defending the service) |
| Mortgage inquiry (feature not yet live; no partner engaged) | Contact details, financing details you provide | Your request; not transmitted to any third party until/unless a partner is engaged and you are informed |
| Valuation inquiry / report (feature not yet live) | Contact details, property details | Your request / contract |
| Marketing (newsletter), if any | Email, preferences | Consent (withdrawable any time) |
| Analytics, cookies, fraud/abuse prevention, security | Technical/usage data, IP, device | Consent (non-essential cookies) / legitimate interest |
| Legal compliance, claims | As required | Legal obligation / legitimate interest |
How the marketplace features use data
- Unique visits. To count each visitor at most once a day per listing without identifying anyone, our server computes a one-way code from your IP address, your browser identifier and the listing, using a random key that changes every day. We do not store your IP address for this purpose. So that one connection cannot inflate a listing's figures, we also count how many new visitors each network address adds to a listing in a day; that count is kept in temporary memory for about a day under a one-way code computed from the address, the listing and the same daily key, never under the address itself. The codes and the daily keys are deleted automatically after a short period, measured in days, after which a visit can no longer be linked to anyone; only daily totals per listing remain. Visits by the Advertiser, its team, our staff and recognisable automated programs are not counted. The totals feed the Advertiser's statistics and the “In demand” indicator.
- Deal closure confirmation. If you sent an inquiry about a listing from your account, the Advertiser may name you as the person who rented or bought it. The Advertiser sees you under the name you gave in your inquiry, which they already received (or your account name if the inquiry carried none). You receive an email and a notification in your account naming the Advertiser (the agency, or the private Advertiser's name) and the property, and you decide whether to confirm. If you confirm, our team reviews the closure with signals computed at that moment: your account's age and how many other inquiries, saved searches and favourites it has, and whether your connection shared a network or browser with the Advertiser's side in the preceding hours. That last check reads the security logs described above, yours and those of the Advertiser and its team, at the moment of confirmation, and its result is stored only as a yes/no answer, never as an address. A final price the Advertiser declares is private: it is never published, only the Advertiser and our reviewers see it, and it will only ever be used in statistics aggregated over enough transactions that no single one can be identified. A public profile shows only the number of approved closures and the average time to close, never prices or the people involved.
- Weekly summary. Advertisers with live listings receive, at most once a week and only in weeks with activity, an email with their listings' figures. Every summary carries a one-click unsubscribe link, and the summary can be switched off or on again from the dashboard; this does not affect inquiry notifications.
- Notifications. Questions that need your answer, such as a deal closure confirmation, also appear in your account under the notifications bell.
- Agency contact details from public sources. To present homehunt.ch to agencies, our team compiles the business contact details that agencies publish themselves: on their advertiser pages on property portals such as homegate.ch, and on each agency's own website (imprint and contact pages), which our server reads automatically. We do not use a portal's inquiry forms or the personal pages of individual agents, and we keep the address of the page each detail came from. These details are used to contact the agency about joining homehunt.ch. An agency that declines or asks us to stop is marked so that it is not contacted again, and its details are deleted on request; write to privacy@homehunt.ch to object, to ask where your details came from, or to have them removed. Listings imported from other portals are reviewed by our team before they are published, and their advertiser may ask us to remove them or their details at any time.
3. Source
Mostly from you directly; some technical data is collected automatically when you use the site. Business contact details of agencies and listings imported from other portals come from sources their owners made public (see above).
4. Recipients
- Advertisers: when you send an inquiry, your message and contact details go to the relevant Advertiser (and, where it is an IBEX mandate, to IBEX as broker).
- Service providers acting on our instructions under data-processing agreements: our hosting provider DigitalOcean, LLC (the homehunt.ch application and its database run in DigitalOcean's Frankfurt am Main data centre, Germany); email delivery through Amazon Web Services (Amazon SES) or Twilio SendGrid; alerts to our own team about events on the site (a new account, an agency waiting for approval) through Telegram, which receive a username or an agency name and never contact details; web analytics through Google Analytics, loaded only with your consent (see the Cookie notice).
- Stripe (Stripe Payments Europe, Ltd., Dublin, together with Stripe, Inc. in the United States) handles payment for paid listing plans and one-off sponsored visibility purchases. You enter your card details on Stripe's own hosted checkout page, so they never reach homehunt.ch: we store only the billing contact, the plan, the subscription status, the renewal date and Stripe's own customer and subscription identifiers, and for a sponsored visibility purchase the listing, period, amount, payment status and Stripe's checkout and payment identifiers. For the payment and fraud-prevention data it collects itself, Stripe acts as an independent controller under its own privacy policy.
- OpenStreetMap services and official open data: to show what is near a listing (public transport, schools, shops) and transport works under construction near a property for sale, our server sends the listing's map point to public OpenStreetMap Overpass servers; to place a listing on the map, it sends the listing's address to the OpenStreetMap Foundation's Nominatim service. Our server sends nothing else to them: no data about visitors, and no names or contact details. Maps on the site are drawn with OpenStreetMap map tiles that your browser loads directly from the OpenStreetMap Foundation's tile servers, which, like any website, receive your IP address and browser identifier with each request. The market figures on sale listings come from open data we download from the Swiss Federal Statistical Office (FSO) and swisstopo; nothing is sent to them.
- Valuation & financing partners: we do not currently work with a valuation or mortgage/financing partner. If we engage one, your data will be shared only when you request that service and after you have been informed; the partner acts as an independent controller under its own privacy notice, and we will disclose any referral arrangement to you.
- Authorities/courts where legally required.
5. Data location / international transfers
The homehunt.ch application and its database are hosted in Frankfurt am Main, Germany (EU). Germany ensures an adequate level of data protection under the Swiss Federal Council's adequacy list. Some of our providers are US companies (DigitalOcean, LLC; Amazon Web Services, Inc.; Twilio Inc.; Google LLC; Stripe, Inc.), and Telegram, which carries those internal team alerts, processes data outside Switzerland and the EU. Where personal data is processed in the United States, we rely on the Swiss-US Data Privacy Framework and/or the EU Standard Contractual Clauses (with the Swiss addendum), or on a statutory exception such as your consent.
6. Retention
We keep data only as long as necessary for the purpose or as required by law: account data while the account is active and thereafter as legal retention requires (commercial/accounting records, including billing and subscription records, up to 10 years, OR); inquiry leads typically 30 days to 24 months; technical/log data typically 6 to 24 months; marketing data until you unsubscribe.
Some data is deleted automatically after short fixed periods set in our configuration: security and service logs containing IP addresses after a matter of weeks (records of errors the service raised may be kept longer, without IP addresses); visit codes and their daily keys after a matter of days. Deal closure records are kept as long as the listing they concern, because approved closures make up the counts shown on public profiles. Inquiries are anonymised automatically after a longer fixed period, also set in our configuration: the name, email address, phone number and message are cleared and the inquiry is unlinked from the account that sent it, so it can no longer be traced to you and can no longer be used to name you in a deal; only the fact that the listing received an inquiry remains.
7. Your rights (revFADP)
Access, rectification, erasure, restriction, objection, data portability and withdrawal of consent. If you have an account, you can download a copy of its data as a JSON file and delete the account yourself from your dashboard (section “Account”). To exercise any right, or for data not linked to an account: privacy@homehunt.ch; we may need to verify your identity. You may lodge a complaint with the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (FDPIC/EDÖB/PFPDT), Bern: edoeb.admin.ch.
8. Cookies / tracking
See the Cookie notice.
9. Security & minors
We take appropriate technical and organisational measures. The site is intended for adults; we do not knowingly collect minors' data.
10. Changes
We may update this notice; the current version is the one published here.