Policy development · SaaS & technology
Privacy & Security Policy Development for Proptech & Real Estate Software
Privacy policy development for a proptech company means writing the retention schedules, screening disclosures and access-log rules that satisfy both regulator guidance and the landlord clients who rely on your representations. The trigger is usually a landlord client's legal team asking pointed questions about your public privacy policy, or a new smart-lock or PAD feature that the current documentation never anticipated. We write policies your product actually follows.
Reviewed by the Privacy Horizon team · Last reviewed
What you're protecting
The policies a proptech product needs beyond a generic privacy notice
A template privacy policy written for a typical SaaS product misses several practices specific to rental and transaction platforms.
Rental-application data retention policy
A schedule setting when applications, credit scores and identification photos get purged after a landlord makes a tenancy decision, including what happens to rejected applicants' files.
Screening and consumer-report disclosure
Clear language explaining when a credit check happens, what consent is required first, and how a consumer report factors into the screening score shown to a landlord.
Access-log and smart-lock retention limits
A defined retention period for fob, smart-lock and video-intercom logs, since these records can accumulate indefinitely by default without a written limit in place.
Vendor and sub-processor disclosure
A current list of the credit bureaus, e-signature tools and hosting providers that touch applicant and tenant data, kept accurate as integrations change.
Employee and support-team policy
Internal guidance covering how support staff handle applicant ID documents and tenant complaints, distinct from the public-facing privacy policy.
Regulatory map
What the policy has to reflect
Several sources shape what a defensible policy for this industry has to say, beyond the general privacy statutes every business follows.
Federal guidance written for rental applications
The regulator's landlord-tenant guidance directly addresses what a rental-application policy should say about SIN collection, credit-check consent and minimum retention, making it the closest thing this niche has to a policy checklist.
Human-rights limits on scoring disclosure
Ontario's rental-housing policy means a screening product's documentation should not describe scoring logic that automates a rent-to-income cutoff or penalizes applicants receiving social assistance.
PIPEDA's openness principle
Organizations must make their privacy practices readily available, which for a proptech product means the policy needs to actually match what the application, screening and payment flows do, not a generic boilerplate.
Quebec Law 25 disclosure requirements
Platforms with Quebec landlords or tenants need policy language covering automated decision-making, retention periods and the right to request information be deleted.
What goes wrong
What weak policy documentation exposes
A policy that does not match actual product behaviour becomes evidence against the company, not protection for it.
A published policy that contradicts the product
If the public policy says data is deleted after ninety days but the retention schedule engineering actually runs is a year, that gap becomes the first thing a regulator or a landlord's lawyer points to.
Undisclosed sub-processors
A credit bureau, e-signature vendor or hosting provider added to the stack without a policy update leaves the company representing a data flow that no longer reflects reality.
Retention rules absent for access logs
Without a written limit, smart-lock and video-intercom logs tend to accumulate indefinitely, turning a building's access system into a long-term surveillance archive nobody decided to keep.
Screening-industry scrutiny raising the bar
With one screening firm's consent and accuracy practices under active regulatory investigation, vague policy language about how scores are calculated draws more scrutiny than it once did.
Our policy development for proptech & real estate software
What our policy development covers for proptech companies
Custom, compliance-ready policies built around your actual data flows, kept current as the product and its regulatory landscape change.
Custom policies
Documents written to match how your screening, application and payment flows actually operate, rather than adapted from an unrelated industry template.
Compliance-ready drafting
Policies drafted with PIPEDA, applicable provincial statutes and Law 25 in mind, so the language holds up when a landlord client's legal team or a regulator reviews it.
Employee and vendor guidelines
Internal documentation setting expectations for staff handling applicant data and for vendors touching screening, payment or access-control information.
Ongoing updates
Revisions as new features, integrations or landlord-jurisdiction expansions change what the policy needs to say, so documentation does not quietly go stale.
How the engagement runs
How the policy development engagement runs
We build from how the product actually behaves, not from a blank template.
Step 1
Review current data flows
We walk through how applications, screening, payments and access-control data actually move through the system, comparing that to any existing policy language.
Step 2
Draft the policy set
Public-facing privacy policy, internal handling guidelines and retention schedules are drafted together so they stay consistent with each other.
Step 3
Review against guidance and landlord expectations
Drafts are checked against rental-application guidance and human-rights limits on scoring, and adjusted for what institutional landlord clients typically ask to see.
Step 4
Publish and schedule review
Final policies are handed off for publication, with a review cadence set so the documentation keeps pace with new features and integrations.
What it costs
What determines policy-development pricing here
Cost depends on how many distinct data flows the product has, whether Quebec-specific language is needed, and how much internal guidance for staff and vendors is required alongside the public policy. A screening tool with a single application flow is simpler than a full property-management suite spanning applications, payments and access control.
Policy development also falls inside the Virtual Privacy Office, priced from $2,200 CAD per month on an annual term, for companies that would rather have policies and agreements reviewed continuously than commission a one-time drafting project.
Proptech & Real Estate Software: Policy development questions, answered
It should state how long applications, screening scores and ID images are kept after a tenancy decision, distinguish between accepted and rejected applicants, and describe how deletion is actually carried out rather than just promised. Ontario carries no separate retention statute for this data, so the policy has to rest on PIPEDA's proportionality principle and the federal landlord-tenant guidance directly.
Beyond standard PIPEDA disclosures, it needs plain language on when consent is obtained before a credit check, how a screening score is calculated at a level applicants can understand, retention limits for consumer-report data, and confirmation that results are never shared to an informal bad-tenant list. Given current scrutiny of screening practices, vague or aspirational language here draws more attention than it used to.
There is no fixed statutory number, so the policy should set a retention period tied to a legitimate purpose, such as investigating a specific incident, rather than keeping fob and video-intercom logs indefinitely by default. A common approach limits routine logs to a period measured in weeks or months, with a documented exception process for logs relevant to an active investigation.
Not necessarily separate documents, but the policy needs to acknowledge where obligations diverge, particularly Quebec's Law 25 requirements around automated decision-making and deletion rights, and Alberta and BC's separate breach-notification duties under their own PIPA statutes. Most proptech companies use one policy that layers in province-specific sections rather than maintaining several full versions.
At minimum annually, and immediately after any change that alters what data is collected or how it flows, such as adding a new screening vendor, a payment processor or a smart-lock integration. A policy that lags behind product changes becomes a liability the moment someone compares what it says to what the product actually does.
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