How we handle your information · Neutral demonstration
Privacy, cookies & how we are regulated.
The plain version of what a well-run agency should tell you before you hand over a phone number: what we would hold, why, how a complaint is heard, and how client money would be protected.
Your information
An estate agency handles some of the most sensitive details in your life — where you live, what you earn, when the house is empty. A real Bellbrook & Vale would collect only what a sale or let needs: your name and contact details, the property address, and the notes you choose to give us. It would use them to value, market and progress your move, and for the identity checks the law requires (below).
Your details would be kept only as long as the law and a live instruction need, shared only with the people moving the sale forward — a conveyancer, a mortgage adviser you have asked us to speak to — and never sold on. You would have the right to see what is held, correct it, and ask for it to be deleted, and to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) if we got it wrong.
Complaints & redress
If something went wrong, a well-run agency hears it in-house first: put it in writing, get a named person and a timescale, and a final written answer within eight weeks. If you were still unhappy, you could take it — free — to an independent redress scheme every estate agent is legally required to belong to.
A real agency would name its scheme here and carry the logo. The two approved schemes are The Property Ombudsman (opens in a new tab) and the Property Redress Scheme (opens in a new tab).
Client Money Protection
When an agency holds your money — a tenancy deposit, rent passing through, a sale deposit — that money must be ring-fenced in a dedicated client account, separate from the firm's own, and covered by an approved Client Money Protection (CMP) scheme so you are repaid if it is ever misused. Letting agents must also protect tenancy deposits in a government-approved scheme.
You can check the government's list of approved schemes on GOV.UK (opens in a new tab), and confirm any tenancy deposit is protected via the deposit protection schemes (opens in a new tab).
Nothing on this page is legal advice, and Bellbrook & Vale is a neutral demonstration, not a trading agency — the scheme memberships described are the ones a real agency of this kind would hold.