How we look after your information.

We're J.R. Hopper & Co. (Property Services) Limited - J.R. Hopper & Co. to everyone who knows us - an independent estate agency in the Yorkshire Dales. Company number 03438347, registered office at Hall House, Woodhall, Askrigg, Leyburn, North Yorkshire, DL8 3LB. We're registered with the Information Commissioner's Office (registration Z1311857), and the person who looks after data protection here can be reached at enquiries@jrhopper.com.

This notice covers the whole business, not just this website, because in practice they're the same thing: an enquiry you make here ends up in the same place as one you make by phone.

Our web server (in London) keeps standard technical logs - your IP address and the pages requested - for 14 days, for security and troubleshooting. We count page and property views using an anonymous code that can't be traced back to you; the raw counts are deleted within 90 days and only totals are kept.

We set two cookies, both essential: one keeps your session working, one protects forms from forgery. Neither tracks you, which is why there's no cookie banner to click.

Some property pages offer video and virtual tours - those only load when you press play. Videos play through YouTube's privacy-enhanced player, which sets no tracking cookies. Virtual tours play either from our own server or through Matterport, whose player sets only a short-lived security cookie.

Pages with maps load them from Google, which tells Google's servers your IP address (as does any embedded content on any website) but sets no cookies.

When you send an enquiry, request a viewing, or book a valuation, we collect what the form asks for - your name, how to reach you, and what you've told us - and nothing else. The website doesn't store it: it's emailed straight into our customer system, Rex, so the right person can pick it up. The email travels through SMTP2GO, a delivery service that processes it in the EU and doesn't keep message contents. The first time we have your email address you'll also receive a single welcome email - section 7 explains.

Enquiries - from this website, the property portals, phone, or email - go into our customer relationship system, Rex, so the right person can pick them up and so we have a record of what's been said. We use them to answer you, arrange viewings, and follow up.

If your enquiry arrives through one of the property portals, you may get a WhatsApp message from our business WhatsApp number asking whether you'd like a mortgage referral or, if you're buying outside our area, an introduction to an agent local to you. Fair warning: that's an automated assistant, run for us by SalesRook, and it stays automated - message it later and it will tell you it's a bot and to contact the office instead (we're human). If you say yes to a referral, the assistant passes your details straight to the relevant partner - the mortgage adviser, or the Relocation Agent Network; if you don't, they go nowhere. Either way, what we receive is your original enquiry plus a summary of that conversation. And because it's WhatsApp, the messages are also handled under Meta's own terms.

When we value or sell your property we hold the details you'd expect - who you are, the property, our notes, what's agreed. Two things are worth knowing:

• Identity checks. Anti-money-laundering law requires us to verify who you are and your right to sell. We use Lifetime Legal and APLYiD for this - usually through their smartphone apps; where that's not practical we copy documents at the office and pass them to the same providers (our scanning inbox deletes everything after 48 hours). The resulting reports are kept for at least five years after our relationship ends, as HMRC requires.
• Valuation notes. We keep valuation notes long-term - deliberately. Knowing what we said about a house in 2015 is genuinely useful when we value it again in 2026.

The first time we have your email address - an enquiry, a viewing request, a valuation - you'll receive a single welcome email, sent for us by BriefYourMarket, inviting you to subscribe to our newsletter and property updates. Subscribe and you'll hear from us; don't, and that's the last marketing you'll see. Separately, if you've asked us to look out for a particular kind of property, we'll email you matches - that's part of the service you asked for, not the newsletter, and each stream stops on its own.

Every marketing email has an unsubscribe link, and unsubscribing actually works - or just tell us and we'll take you off. We don't do targeted advertising or profiling, and we never sell or rent our mailing list.

Our calls - inbound and outbound - are recorded for training and so there's a record of what was agreed. The phone system is managed for us by CRE Group and runs on 8x8; recordings are kept for 30 days and then deleted automatically. Voicemails are transcribed and emailed to the office, where the message is kept like any other emailed enquiry.

If you ask us to recommend a solicitor, mortgage broker, or removals firm, we'll pass your details on - when you ask, and only then.

Our customer system, Rex, stores UK customer data in UK and European data centres. Our email and documents are on Microsoft 365. This website runs on a server in London, and its backups stay under our control. Some of our providers use services outside the UK - Rex, for instance, sends pseudonymised analytics data (stripped of directly identifying details before it leaves the UK) to Australia - and where data does leave the UK it's protected by the UK government's adequacy findings or contractual safeguards approved for the purpose.

The reviews on this site come from allAgents, the review platform, where our customers post them. If you've written one and want it changed or removed, you can do that yourself by logging into your allAgents account - or ask us and we'll take it up with allAgents for you.

We keep information for as long as it's genuinely relevant, and the honest answer is that different things stay relevant for different lengths of time:

• Transaction and contract records - six years, because the law lets either of us bring a claim for that long.
• Identity checks (AML) - at least five years after our relationship ends, as required by HMRC.
• Valuation notes - long-term, on purpose (see section 6).
• Enquiries that go nowhere - stay in our system until a periodic review judges them no longer relevant; we don't currently delete them on a fixed schedule.
• Website logs and statistics - 14 and 90 days respectively, automatically.
• AML scanning inbox - 48 hours, automatically.

You can ask us what we hold about you, ask for corrections, ask for deletion, object to any use of your data, and take your mailing-list membership into your own hands at any time. Email enquiries@jrhopper.com - we may need to check you are who you say you are (proportionately; we won't demand your passport for a mailing-list removal), and we'll respond within a month.

If you ask us to delete your information we will, unless there's a legal reason we can't (an AML record, say, or a transaction within its six years). We'll be honest about scope, too: your customer record, correspondence, and mailing-list entries we can and will remove; a passing mention in the notes of an old viewing appointment is beyond what we can reliably hunt down, and we won't pretend otherwise.

Tell us first - enquiries@jrhopper.com - and we'll try to put it right. If you're not happy with our answer, the Information Commissioner's Office is the UK's data protection regulator: ico.org.uk, or 0303 123 1113. If your complaint is about our service rather than your data, our complaints procedure is the place to start.