Privacy policy

Who we are

RealSoon (realsoon.co) is a free information platform about new developments and off-plan homes in Cape Town. We are not an estate agent or a developer: we do not sell property, negotiate or handle money. RealSoon is the responsible party for the personal information described here.

Questions about this policy, and requests about your information, go to [email protected], which also reaches our information officer.

What we collect and why

We only collect what you give us through a form, plus the technical information every website receives.

• Newsletter and follows. Your email address, an optional first name, the preferences you choose (places, budget, bedrooms, completion year, whether you want the digest and alerts) and the developments you follow. We also store the consent wording you agreed to, when you agreed and the IP address you agreed from, and a record of the emails we sent you. We use this to send the newsletter and alerts you asked for, matched to your preferences.
• Enquiries. On developments whose developer or agency subscribes to RealSoon, the enquiry form collects your name, email, an optional phone number, your message and whether you want a viewing. We pass your enquiry to that developer or agency so they can reply to you.
• Claims and portal accounts. When someone claims a development or developer page we collect their name, work email, the organisation and its website, and for estate agents a Fidelity Fund Certificate number, which we check against the PPRA register. Approved claimants get an account with their name, email, a password (stored only as a hash) and optional two-factor authentication.
• Corrections and complaints. The corrections form collects your name, email, an optional organisation and page address, and the details you write, so we can look into the request and reply.
• Page views. We count how often development and developer pages are viewed, as one total per page per day. These counts use no cookies, no third-party analytics and no personal information.
• Technical information. Like any website, our server and Cloudflare (which sits in front of it) receive your IP address, browser and the pages you request, and keep logs for security and troubleshooting. We use your IP address to limit repeated form submissions.

We use Google Search Console and PageSpeed Insights to see how the site performs in search and how fast it loads. They give us totals for searches and pages, not information about individual visitors, and we add no Google tracking code to the site.

Cookies

The site sets only the cookies it needs to work: a session cookie and a security token that protects forms, which expire after two hours of inactivity. If you sign in to a portal account and tick “Remember me”, a further cookie keeps you signed in. We use no advertising or analytics cookies.

Your consent and our reasons

We email the newsletter and alerts only with your consent, confirmed through the link in the first email we send you (double opt-in). You can withdraw it at any time. We process enquiries, claims, accounts and correction requests because you asked us to act on them. We keep technical logs because we have a legitimate interest in keeping the site secure and working.

Who receives your information

We do not sell personal information, and we do not pass newsletter subscribers or followers to developers, agents or anyone else.

• Enquiries go to the developer or agency that subscribes to RealSoon for that development, by email and in their portal. They then handle your information under their own privacy policy. Our team can also see every enquiry.
• Developers and agencies see only totals of their followers and page views, never who follows them.
• Service providers who process information on our behalf: our hosting provider, Cloudflare (network and security), our email delivery provider, and the AI providers our team uses for some work in our admin (such as Anthropic), which may see the records involved in that work. Some of these providers process information outside South Africa.
• Authorities, where the law requires it.

How long we keep it

We keep your newsletter details while you are subscribed. If you unsubscribe we keep your address marked as unsubscribed, so we do not email you again, until you ask us to delete it. Enquiries, claims, accounts and correction requests are kept while we need them for the purpose they were given and to keep a record of what we did; ask us and we will delete what we no longer need. If an address bounced or someone marked our email as spam, we keep that address on a do-not-email list.

Unsubscribe and preferences

Every newsletter email has an unsubscribe link (and one-click unsubscribe in mail apps that support it) and a link to your preferences page. That page is private to you through a secret code in the link: there you can change what you hear about, stop following developments, unsubscribe, or delete your details altogether. You can also sign up again later.

Your rights

Under POPIA you may:

• ask whether we hold information about you and for a copy of it;
• ask us to correct or delete it;
• object to us processing it, including for direct marketing, and withdraw your consent;
• complain to the Information Regulator (South Africa) at inforegulator.org.za.

Email [email protected] or use the corrections form (choose “POPIA objection”). We may ask you to confirm it is you before we act, and we reply as soon as we can.

Security

The site runs over HTTPS. Passwords are stored as hashes, staff need their own accounts with permissions limited to their work, and changes to content are recorded in an audit log. No system is perfectly secure; if a breach affects your information we will tell you and the Information Regulator as POPIA requires.

Changes and contact

When we change this policy we update the date at the top. We keep a record of the exact consent wording each subscriber agreed to. Contact us at [email protected]. Our terms of use explain how the site works.