Privacy Policy

1. Privacy Statement Worth Property Agents will manage your personal information in accordance with our Privacy Policy. If you provide us with your details, we may contact you about our services such as property listings and promotions. We may use your personal information within WORTH and disclose it to our authorised representatives and service providers who act on our behalf, to fulfil the purpose for collecting your information. Without your information, we may not be able to provide you with services and you may omit receiving valuable information from us. We do not collect sensitive information about you unless you provide it to us willingly. You have a right to access your personal information that we hold and may ask us to make changes. 2. Privacy Policy 1) Introduction Worth Property Agents respect the status of protecting your privacy. We comply with our obligations under the Privacy Act 1998 (Privacy Act), including the Australian Privacy Principles (APPs) as well as the Privacy (Credit Reporting) Code 2014 (CR Code). Our Privacy Policy describes how WORTH collects, manages, uses, and releases your personal information. By providing us with your personal information, you give us permission to use and share it for the purposes set out in this Privacy Policy. We will update this Privacy Policy when our information handling practices are updated, or when required. Any revised Privacy Policy will take effect when it is published on our website. 2) Our functions and activities We collect, hold, use, and release your personal information so that we can perform our tasks and activities and provide first-class customer service. Our collection, use and disclosure of your personal information will depend on our relationship with you, the context of collection and the type of services you request from us. We may obtain, hold, use, and disclose your personal information for the following purposes: • To provide and administer our products and services, including market properties for vendors and landlords, facilitate transactions for sales and leasing, assess and originate your application for finance or mortgage insurance and manage that finance, property concierge services, verify your identity, conduct credit checks and process payments if applicable; • To respond to your requests and enquiries about our products and services and property listings; • To provide customer assistance, including conducting, investigating and responding to enquiries, surveys, feedback, comments and complaints; • To distribute our newsletters and other communications either alone or with the assistance of service providers on information about us, our conferences, training and events, our property listings and our related products and services; • To plan, market, host and facilitate our conferences, training sessions and events; • To inform and conduct marketing activities including to promote our products and services; • To conduct research about your interests and attitudes towards our products and services to improve our products and services, marketing activities and customer experience; • To assess the performance of our websites and improve the operation of the websites; • To perform data analyses and generate customer insights which may include combining personal information received from reputable data sources and public sources of information; • To manage and carry out our business and operational functions, including Huma Resource management, business decisions and assessing your suitability for appointment as a franchisee or contractor agent or broker; • To maintain records and comply with our legal requirements and standards of practice. 3) Information we collect Personal information is any information about you, from which you can be identified. We may collect your name, address, postcode, email address, date of birth, gender, employment, telephone number, property details, payment details and proof of identity such as your driver licence or passport number. We may collect additional personal information from you from time to time. Personal information we collect about you may also include credit-related personal information. Credit-related information is information used and disclosed to assess your creditworthiness, assess your application for finance and manage that finance. The types of credit-related personal information that we collect about you may include your credit liability information, repayment history information, the type and amount of finance you are applying for, court proceedings, insolvency actions and credit worthiness. We generally do not collect sensitive information about you unless you provide it to us willingly. For example, when you liaise with one of our agents or brokers, you may share sensitive information such as racial or ethnic origin, sexual orientation, health information, religious or philosophical beliefs or political opinion and membership or affiliation information. You give permission to us collecting sensitive information which you provide to us freely. If we need to collect any sensitive information for a specific purpose, we will ask for your approval. If you provide us sensitive information, we will treat it as personal information and handle it in accordance with this Privacy Policy. You don’t have to give us all the information we request. However, if you do not provide us with some or all of the personal information required, we may not be able to provide you with the products and services or information you request, to the highest standard or at all, and you may also miss out on receiving helpful information about us and our products and services. 4) How we collect information Where we can, we will collect information directly from you. We collect personal information when you: • Request us to provide our products and services or information about our products and services, including sales, and leasing; • Contact us to make an enquiry about our listed properties or our products and services, including online, over the phone or in person; • Subscribe to communications from us such as updates, publications or newsletters; • Tell us about your preferences when making an enquiry or using our products and services; • Contact us to provide feedback, comments or suggestions on our tasks and activities or complete one of our surveys; • Communicate or engage with us through our websites or social media platforms; • Apply for a job with us or become an employee, or become a supplier or contractor that provide a product or service to Worth Property Agents; • Otherwise interact with us or share your personal information to us. As well as collecting information directly from you, there may be occasions when we may collect information about you from other people or organisations. We may pool this information with information we already have about you to help us understand trends, qualities, behaviour, and preferences. Where we receive information about you indirectly from a third party, we require that the service provider has collected and disclosed that information in accordance with the Privacy Act. Worth Property Agents may collect information about you from: • Credit reporting bodies and providers, law enforcement agencies and government agencies to verify your identity or assess your credit worthiness; • Trustworthy data sources and publicly available sources of information; • Your representatives (lawyers, mortgage broker, accountants and financial advisors); • Your nominated referee or employer when you apply to rent a property or for finance; • Service Providers that provide marketing leads, marketing and data analysis services to us; • Service Providers that conduct our surveys for us; • If you are a prospective employee, your nominated referee, law enforcement agencies for police checks or intermediaries such as recruitment agents and personnel providers. 5) Cookies and how we use them Worth Property Agents may use cookies and tools, such as web beacons and web server logs, to collect, store and monitor visitor traffic information and actions on our website. Cookies are small data files which are placed on your computer that allows our websites to “remember you” when you return to our websites. These cookies and tools are not used to record any personal information. Services other than Worth Property Agents may leave cookies in your browser. They may have their own privacy policies that govern their use of cookies. The information collected by these tools may include geolocation data, the IP address of the device you are using and information about websites that the IP address has come from, the pages accessed on our website and the next website visited. Worth Property Agents may use and pool this information to maintain, secure and enhance our websites, improve your customer experience when using our websites, display and deliver relevant content, services and advertising and understand the effectiveness of our marketing and advertising (including direct marketing and online ads on external websites). If you want to prevent cookies being used, you can change your browser settings to disable cookies. However, this might mean that your access to parts of our website is limited, or you may experience reduced functionality when accessing certain website functions. 6) Disclosure of personal information Worth Property Agents may disclose your personal information and credit-related information within Worth group including to our officers, employees, agents, brokers, and contractors. We may disclose your personal information and credit-related information as part of our functions and activities, including: • To the other parties in any real estate transaction including developers, vendors, landlords, purchasers and tenants, and their authorised representative; • To guarantors, other mortgage intermediaries, lenders, financial institutions, insurers, valuers and credit reporting bodies and providers; • To your authorised representatives (lawyers, mortgage brokers, accountants and financial advisors); • To regulatory bodies, government agencies and law enforcement bodies in any jurisdiction; • To the relevant government agency for verification of attendance at conferences and training sessions for continuing professional development requirements; • To debt collectors and utility companies; • If you are an employee or contractor to WORTH sales consultants when on secondment or to hotels, airlines and other providers when you travel; • If you are a shareholder, our share register is available for inspection by the public as required under the Corporations Act 2001 (Cth). The information collected in connection with your shareholding may also be disclosed to regulatory bodies such as the Australian Taxation Office; • To our suppliers and service providers that provide products and services to assist us to perform our functions and activities such as marketing, events, recruitment, Human Resources and share registry management; and • When we may be required by law from time to time. Worth Property Agents gathers information from various on-line platforms and services, such as Facebook and Google. Users of these platforms and services may elect to send information to WORTH from the platform. WORTH uses this information strictly in accordance with the terms imposed by that platform; this Policy; and the purposes for which the information was collected. Worth Property Agents never sells or monetises your personal information. We require that all of those to whom we share personal information or who may have access to personal information, have appropriate measures in place to protect your personal information in a manner that is consistent with our Privacy Policy, including in relation to security and confidentiality. They must only use your personal information for authorised purposes. 7) Direct Marketing Worth Property Agents may send direct marketing communications to you about our team, services, property listings and other material that we consider you would find noteworthy or helpful. You can choose to opt out of receiving these direct marketing communications at any time by unsubscribing or by contacting us directly by phone or email. If you choose to opt out of all direct marketing communications, please note that WORTH may still contact you for other reasonable purposes, including information that WORTH is legally required to send, notifications of changes to WORTH services, policies and information regarding the use, rights, benefits, or obligations of customers of our products and services. 8) Holding information and keep it secure at WORTH At WORTH we ensure that we always hold your personal information securely. Your personal information may be stored both electronically, on our own servers and those of our service providers, and in hard copy at our secured office. We take the security of your personal information seriously and we implement a range of technical, administrative, personnel and physical measures to safeguard your personal information against loss, interference and unauthorised access, modification and disclosure, and misuse, including using electronic and physical access restrictions to files containing personal information and ensuring encoding of personal information sent and received. 9) Do we disclose your personal information to anyone outside Australia? We may disclose personal information to our related bodies corporate and third-party suppliers and service providers located overseas for some of the purposes listed above. We take reasonable steps to ensure that the overseas recipients of your personal information do not breach the privacy obligations relating to your personal information. We may disclose your personal information to entities located outside of Australia, including the following: • our data hosting and other IT service providers, located in various countries; and • other third parties located in various foreign countries. Some of the information collected by us may be disclosed to employees or contractors of Worth Property Investing Pty Ltd outside of Australia. You consent to your information being disclosed to a destination outside Australia for this purpose, including but not limited to Cebu, Philippines, and you understand and acknowledge that Australian Privacy Principle 8.1 will not apply to such disclosures of your personal information. We currently have a relationship with a company which provides administration services to our firm under our direct control, working from the Philippines. These professionals, whilst part of our business, have audited access to our software and client information, that we constantly monitor ensuring no information is ever downloaded. All work is performed on our systems in accordance with strict security and process protocols and is monitored by our staff. We may disclose your personal information to entities within Australia who may store or process your data overseas. In the event that a disclosure is made in an overseas country (which we consider unlikely), the information will not be protected by the Australian Privacy Principles. In any event, by providing your details, you consent to your information being disclosed in this manner. 10.) Access and correction of information about you At WORTH we value making sure that the information we hold about you is up-to-date, accurate and complete. We will do our upmost best to confirm your details through our communications with you and promptly add updated or new personal information to existing records when we are advised. If any of your details change, please let us know and we will update your information. If you believe we are holding information about you that is inaccurate, incomplete, irrelevant, or misleading, you can ask us to change it, or remove it altogether. If you would like to access your personal information, or ask us to edit, change or delete it, you can do so by contacting us in writing and confirming your identity. We will reply to your request within 30 days. We will only decline access in exceptional circumstances, and if this is the case, we will advise you the purpose for doing so. 11) Privacy complaints and further information At WORTH we take your complaints seriously and will endeavour to resolve your concern efficiently and fairly. If you believe that Worth Property Agents has breached your privacy, or you have a complaint about how we handle your personal information, you can take the following steps. • Make a complaint addressed to the WORTH Privacy Officer in writing. • The WORTH Privacy Officer will investigate your complaint and will endeavour to provide a response setting out Worth Property Agent’s decision in writing within 30 days of receipt of your complaint. • If WORTH is unable to reasonably resolve your concerns, you can contact the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner on their website www.oaic.gov.au. 12) Privacy Officer contact details If you require: • further information • have any questions • wish to access or correct your personal information or • make a complaint Please contact the WORTH Privacy Officer as follows: Name: Simon Read Email: simon@worthpropertyagents.com.au Phone: 0427 170 485 Post: PO Box 1317 Mooloolaba QLD 4557