Privacy Policy

Roommatch is operated by Eben Owen, a sole trader trading as Roommatch ("Roommatch", "we", "us", "our"). Our contact address for all privacy matters is hello@roommatch.me.

This notice explains how we collect and use personal data when you use the Roommatch website at roommatch.me and the Roommatch enquiry-handling service (the "Service"). It is written to meet our obligations under the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018.

For personal data about landlords who hold a Roommatch account, we are the data controller. For personal data about prospective tenants that a landlord collects, stores or messages through Roommatch, the landlord is the controller and we act as their processor under the terms set out in section 8.

Account data: your name, email address, hashed password, plan and subscription status, notification preferences, and the date you joined.

Property data: the addresses, rents, availability, descriptions and letting criteria you add to the Service, including listings imported from a SpareRoom link you paste.

Enquiry and applicant data: the names, contact details, budgets, move-in dates, occupations, income ranges, references and free-text notes that prospective tenants provide through your application link or that appear in enquiries you import.

Message data: the drafts we generate for you, the messages you approve, and your monthly message usage counts.

Technical data: IP address, browser type, pages viewed, and error logs generated when you use the Service.

Payment data: we use Stripe to take payment. Card details are entered directly with Stripe and are never received or stored by Roommatch. We hold only the Stripe customer and subscription identifiers and your plan status.

We do not intentionally collect special category data. Please do not enter health, ethnicity, religion or similar details into free-text fields.

To provide the Service: creating and securing your account, storing your properties and leads, generating message drafts, scoring applicants against your criteria and tracking replies. Lawful basis: performance of a contract with you.

To take payment and prevent fraud, and to keep accounting records. Lawful bases: contract and legal obligation.

To send service emails such as sign-in, password reset, and notifications about new enquiries. Lawful basis: contract.

To keep the Service secure, debug faults, and prevent abuse of message allowances. Lawful basis: legitimate interests in running a secure and reliable service.

To send occasional product updates to account holders, where you have not opted out. Lawful bases: legitimate interests and, where required, consent. You can opt out from your account settings or any email.

We do not sell personal data, and we do not use your data or your applicants' data to train our own models.

Roommatch uses third-party AI models to draft replies and to produce a non-binding suitability score for each applicant against the criteria you set.

Suitability scores are indicative only. They are not automated decisions with legal or similarly significant effects: no message is sent and no applicant is accepted or refused without a human landlord approving it.

The text sent to the AI provider is limited to what is needed to draft a reply — the property details and the applicant's enquiry. Our AI providers act as processors and are contractually prohibited from using the content to train their models.

Hosting, database, authentication and file storage: Supabase and Cloudflare.

AI drafting: Anthropic (Claude) and the Lovable AI Gateway.

Payments: Stripe.

Email delivery: Resend, for transactional and notification email.

Each of these acts as our processor under a written contract and may process data outside the UK. Where that happens, transfers are covered by the UK International Data Transfer Addendum to the EU Standard Contractual Clauses or an adequacy decision.

We may also disclose data where we are legally required to do so, or to establish or defend legal claims. If the business is sold or transferred, personal data may be transferred to the buyer, subject to this notice.

Account and property data: for as long as your account is open, and for 30 days after you close it, after which it is deleted.

Leads, applications and message drafts: 24 months from creation, or until you delete them, whichever is sooner. Landlords can delete an individual applicant record at any time from the dashboard.

Payment and accounting records: six years, as required by HMRC.

Technical and security logs: 90 days.

You have the right to access a copy of your personal data, to have inaccurate data corrected, to have data erased, to restrict or object to processing, to data portability, and to withdraw consent where consent is the basis for processing.

To exercise any of these rights, email hello@roommatch.me. We will respond within one month.

If you are a prospective tenant and your data was entered by a landlord, please contact that landlord first, as they control the record. If you cannot reach them, contact us and we will help.

You can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk or on 0303 123 1113 if you are unhappy with how we have handled your data.

When you use Roommatch to collect and message prospective tenants, you are the controller of that data and we process it only on your documented instructions, which are the instructions given through the Service.

We will: keep the data confidential; apply the security measures described in section 9; only use sub-processors listed in section 5 and tell you before we add another; assist you with data subject requests and with security incidents; and delete or return the data on termination.

You must: have a lawful basis for collecting applicant data; tell applicants how their data will be used; keep only what you need; and not use the Service to contact people who have asked not to be contacted.

This section forms our data processing agreement with you for the purposes of Article 28 UK GDPR.

All traffic is encrypted in transit with TLS, and data is encrypted at rest by our hosting providers.

Every landlord's properties, leads, applications and message drafts are isolated at the database level with row-level security, so one account cannot read another account's records.

Applicant records are never publicly readable. A public application link exposes only the property's address, rent, bedrooms, availability and description — never applicant data or landlord contact details.

Passwords are hashed by our authentication provider and are never visible to us. Administrative access is limited to the operator of the Service.

If a personal data breach occurs that is likely to result in a risk to individuals, we will notify the ICO within 72 hours and tell affected users without undue delay.

We use only cookies and local storage that are strictly necessary to run the Service: keeping you signed in, remembering beta access, and protecting against cross-site request forgery. These do not require consent.

We do not use advertising cookies or third-party tracking pixels. If we introduce analytics in future, we will ask for your consent first and update this notice.

We may update this notice as the Service changes. The date at the top shows when it was last revised, and we will email account holders about any material change before it takes effect.