Your details, plainly.
What we collect
When you send an enquiry, Custom Homes Southland Ltd collects what you put in the form: your name, email address and phone number, whatever you write about your project, and whether you left the news box ticked. Two things come from your browser rather than from you: which browser it is, and a keyed fingerprint of your connection rather than the address itself. It is unreadable by anyone without the key and is used only to limit how many enquiries one connection may send in an hour. We do not buy lists.
What it is used for
Replying to you about your project, and keeping track of the conversation if there is one. The box asking for occasional news starts ticked: leave it ticked and we may send it, untick it and we will not, and your enquiry is treated exactly the same either way. Tell us at any point that you would rather not hear from us, and we will take you off that list.
If you email us
Email you exchange with us is logged against your enquiry, so that anyone here picking it up can see when we last spoke and roughly what about. What is kept is the date, who it was between, the subject, a link back to the original, and the first two thousand characters of the message. Attachments are not kept.
Most of what reaches us is suppliers and trades, and none of what it says is kept or filed against anybody. Where a message might be yours but we cannot tell, it waits a fortnight for one of us to say yes or no. If nobody does, what it said is deleted, and all that is left is a note that we looked at it once.
Two things worth being plain about. One of us can ask for a search of up to twelve months of earlier email with you, so a conversation that began before you filled in the form is not lost. Sending the form does not start that search: anyone at all can type an address into a form, and none of them should be able to make this system gather up a stranger’s mail. And if you were blind copied on something, we use your address to work out the message was yours, and we do not write that address down.
A computer program reads what is logged and picks out the useful details, a budget, a timeframe, the address of the section, and puts them in front of us with the sentence each one came from, so a person can see what it read and correct it. It sends nothing to anyone and it never replies to you.
If you sign a proposal
A proposal we send you opens at a private link of its own, and that page is one way to accept it: you can also accept by telephone, by email or on paper. Accepting records what you agreed to and how: the mark you draw, the name you type under it, the version of the wording you agreed to, the moment you pressed, and a fingerprint of the document as it stood at that moment. We also note when you first opened the link and when you last opened it.
Two more things come from your browser rather than from you: which browser it is, and the network address the acceptance came from. That address is kept as itself rather than as the keyed fingerprint the enquiry form uses, because the link can be forwarded and those two are the only sign we have of who pressed the button that does not come from whoever pressed it. They are the shortest lived part of that record: we keep them for a year and then clear them, and what you signed stays.
Sending a proposal back with comments instead of accepting it records nothing about your browser or your connection at all. What is kept is what you write and the day you write it.
Where it lives
In a database only Custom Homes can open, run by a specialist database company separate from the one that hosts our website, and holding it for us rather than using it for themselves. It is not sold, traded, or handed to anybody to use for their own purposes.
Who else sees it
What you write in the form, the details held on your enquiry, and the emails described above are sent to Anthropic, who make the language model we use to read them and pull out the useful parts: the budget, the timeframe, where the build would be. That happens automatically, as your enquiry arrives. It is used to help us answer you and for nothing else.
If the form fails, or we cannot tell whether it saved what you sent, a copy is emailed to our own inbox through an email delivery service. The full submission is also kept in the technical records our website host keeps, including when that email is accepted, so a filtered message does not erase the only recovery copy.
How long we keep it
Not forever, and not because somebody remembers to tidy up. We keep what we hold while there is a live conversation or a job in front of us, and for a good while after that in case you come back to us. When there is no longer a reason to hold something, it goes: a job runs every night and does the deleting, so the rule holds whether or not anyone is watching.
The correspondence goes before the record does, so what is left of an old conversation is that it happened, on a date, rather than what was in it. Anything we send you counts as being in touch, a newsletter included, so it keeps the clock running. And if you go on to sign a build with us, we are your builder rather than somebody you enquired with once, and we keep the record.
Seeing it and correcting it
The Privacy Act 2020 gives you the right to see what we hold about you and to have it corrected. Email greg@customhomes.co.nz for either, or call 021 799 422.
Marketing is the one thing you can switch off outright: untick the box, or tell us later. The rest is our own record of doing business, and we hold it on the terms above. If you would rather we did not hold something, ask us and we will tell you what we can do.
Who is responsible
Custom Homes Southland Ltd holds your details. Greg McLeod, our managing director, is the privacy officer for them, and anything on this page is his to answer. Email greg@customhomes.co.nz or call 021 799 422.
If something goes wrong
If your details are ever exposed in a way that could cause you serious harm, the Privacy Act 2020 requires us to tell the Office of the Privacy Commissioner and the people affected as soon as we practically can. That report goes through NotifyUs at privacy.org.nz. If you think something has gone wrong, tell Greg first, on the address or the number above, and he takes it from there.