Privacy policy

Who we are

Balch Estate Agents Limited (“Balch”, “we”, “us”) is responsible for the personal information described here. We are registered in England and Wales (company number 02509544), with our registered office at Saxon House, 27 Duke Street, Chelmsford CM1 1HT. Our office is at The Millars, Hospital Approach, Broomfield, Chelmsford, Essex CM1 7FA.

This policy covers this website and the enquiries you send us through it. It is intended to give you the information required by the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR), the Data Protection Act 2018 and the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR).

For any privacy question or request, email selling@balchagents.com, call 01245 258866 or write to us at our office.

What we collect

• Contact details: your name, email address and telephone number.
• Enquiry details: what you tell us about your enquiry, a valuation or a property you are interested in.
• Your requirements, if you register as a buyer or tenant: areas, budget or rent, bedrooms, property type, your buying position or move-in date, pets, and anything else you add.
• Details about your visit, such as your IP address, browser and device type, and the pages you view.

We do not need sensitive information, such as health details, so please leave it out of enquiries.

How we use it and why

• Replying to your enquiry and arranging viewings or valuations: steps you ask us to take before entering into a contract, or our legitimate interest in responding to people who contact us.
• Our buyer and tenant registers: because you asked to join, we keep your requirements and tell you about homes that may suit you. You can ask to come off a register at any time.
• Keeping a record of enquiries and our replies, so we can deal with any follow-up, query or complaint.
• Keeping the website secure, free of spam and working well: our legitimate interest in a secure, reliable website.

Where we rely on legitimate interests, we have considered that they are not overridden by your rights; ask us for details. You do not have to give us your information, but we cannot reply to you without it. We do not make decisions about you by automated means alone, and this website does not sign you up to marketing emails.

Our enquiry forms

Our four forms (Contact, Register as a buyer, Register as a tenant and the enquiry form on each property) ask only for the details listed above. Your submission is saved in our website database, stored in Frankfurt, Germany, and emailed to our sales or lettings inbox (selling@balchagents.com or renting@balchagents.com) by Resend, an email delivery service. We also note when it was sent and whether the email reached us. Your IP address is not stored with your enquiry.

To stop spam, the forms include hidden checks. No CAPTCHA or outside spam service is used. If you email or phone us instead, we use what you tell us in the same way.

Cookies and website statistics

We do not use advertising or social media tracking cookies. These essential cookies and browser storage, which we understand to be strictly necessary, are always on:

• __cf_bm: set by our content delivery network to tell genuine visitors from automated traffic. It expires after 30 minutes.
• __dpl: set by our hosting platform so your visit is served by one consistent version of the website. It expires after 24 hours.
• Scroll position: remembered in your browser between pages and cleared when you close the tab.
• Saved homes: if you tap the heart on a property, it is saved in your browser only and never sent to us. You can remove saved homes at any time.

PECR does not require consent for strictly necessary cookies. You can block them in your browser, but parts of the website may not then work.

Visit statistics. Our hosting platform keeps basic statistics about visits: the pages viewed, how quickly they load and a random identifier for each visit, with general details such as your browser language, time zone and the page you came from. We use them to keep the website useful and fast, not to identify you or for advertising.

Google Analytics. With your consent, we use Google Analytics to understand how the website is used and improve it. It sets analytics cookies on your device and shares visit information, including pages viewed, browser and device details, with Google. It runs only after you choose “Accept analytics”. You can reject analytics or withdraw consent at any time using “Cookie settings” in the footer. Your choice is remembered on your device for 12 months. Google Signals and advertising personalisation are disabled.

Other services your browser connects to: our typefaces load from Google Fonts and property photos load from Dezrez, our property software provider, so each receives your IP address. The office map on our Contact page loads from Google Maps only when you choose to show it, and Google may then set its own cookies.

Who we share it with

We do not sell personal information. We share it only where needed with service providers who help us run the website and handle enquiries (website hosting and database, Resend for email delivery, our email provider, Dezrez for property information, Google for analytics (with your consent), fonts and maps, and Essex Web Design Studio, which builds and looks after the website), who may use it only to provide their service to us; professional advisers such as accountants, lawyers and insurers; authorities where the law requires; and a buyer or successor if our business is sold or reorganised, who must keep it protected.

Form submissions are stored in Germany, which UK law recognises as giving adequate protection. Some providers, such as Resend and Google, may process information in other countries, including the United States. UK law requires any such transfer to be protected, for example by UK adequacy regulations (including the UK–US data bridge for certified companies) or the ICO’s International Data Transfer Agreement or Addendum.

How long we keep it and how we protect it

We keep personal information only for as long as we need it for the purposes above. The website uses an encrypted (HTTPS) connection, form submissions are kept in a database that visitors cannot access, access is limited to people who need it, and we deal with any data breach as the law requires.

Your rights

You can ask us to give you a copy of your information, correct it, delete it, restrict how we use it, or transfer information you gave us to another organisation. You can object to our use of it where we rely on legitimate interests, object to direct marketing at any time, and withdraw your consent at any time where we rely on it.

Some rights depend on the circumstances. Contact us to make a request; we will respond within one month, normally free of charge.

Complaints and changes

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your information, please tell us first so we can put it right. You can also complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO): ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint, telephone 0303 123 1113.

Websites we link to, such as The Property Ombudsman and Google Maps, have their own privacy policies. Our general complaints procedure is on its own page.

We may update this policy. The latest version, with its date, will always be on this page.

Last updated: 4 November 2026