Privacy Policy

This policy explains how Luis Alves, a licensed REALTOR® (Licence #190001) with Stonehaus Realty Corp., collects, uses, discloses and protects your personal information.

It covers two different situations:

• This website. Anyone who fills in a form here, downloads the guide, or contacts Luis through the site.
• The professional relationship. Clients and other parties in a real estate transaction where Luis acts as their REALTOR®.

Real estate services in British Columbia are provided through a brokerage. Stonehaus Realty Corp. is the brokerage of record and holds the client files created in a transaction. Where the brokerage's own privacy policy applies to those files, it governs them. The brokerage publishes its own privacy notice at stonehausrealty.ca/privacy, and privacy enquiries about brokerage files can be sent to ricky@stonehausrealty.ca.

In British Columbia, private sector organizations are governed by the Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA). Where a transaction or an activity crosses provincial or national borders, the federal PIPEDA may also apply.

Two other rules shape what is written below:

• CASL, Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation, governs the emails you may receive.
• The Proceeds of Crime (Money Laundering) and Terrorist Financing Act, administered by FINTRAC, requires real estate professionals to identify their clients and keep records. This is a legal obligation, not a choice.

3.1 From this website

Where · What

Contact form

Name, email, phone (optional), the subject you select, and your message

Guide / newsletter form

First name and email

Home valuation form

Name, email, phone, property address

WhatsApp button

Nothing is collected by this site. The button opens WhatsApp, and from that point your conversation is handled by WhatsApp under Meta's own terms

We do not ask for financial details, identity documents or any sensitive information through this website. Please do not send them through a web form.

3.2 Website measurement

This website does not currently measure visits. There is no analytics script, no tracking pixel and no advertising cookie on it. If measurement is added later, it will be a tool that counts page views in aggregate without identifying visitors, and this section will be updated before it goes live.

3.3 As your REALTOR®

If you go on to work with Luis as a client, more information becomes necessary, including:

• Contact details and the information needed to understand what you are looking for
• For identity verification required by FINTRAC: your full name, address, date of birth and occupation, and, where applicable, information about a corporation and who is authorized to bind it
• Documents connected to a transaction, such as contracts and correspondence

• To answer you, and to provide the real estate services you ask for
• To send you the guide or the emails you asked to receive
• To meet legal and regulatory obligations, including FINTRAC identification and record keeping, and the rules of the BC Financial Services Authority
• To keep records of the advice given and the steps taken in a transaction

We do not sell your personal information. We do not rent it. We do not trade it.

We tell you why we are collecting your information at the moment we collect it.

• Filling in a form and sending it is your consent for us to use that information to reply to you.
• Ticking the box to receive the guide or emails is your express consent under CASL.
• Some collection is required by law, such as FINTRAC identification. Consent does not apply there: without it, the transaction cannot proceed.

You can withdraw consent at any time, subject to legal and contractual limits. Write to the contact in section 12. We will tell you what withdrawing means in practice before we act on it.

Every commercial email we send includes who it is from, a current mailing address, a way to contact us, and a working unsubscribe link.

Unsubscribing is free, and we action it within 10 business days, as CASL requires.

Unsubscribing from marketing emails does not stop the emails that are part of a transaction you are in.

• Stonehaus Realty Corp., the brokerage, which is required to supervise and keep records of the work
• Service providers who operate the website, send email and store files on our behalf, and only for that purpose
• Other professionals in your transaction, when you ask us to, such as lawyers, notaries, mortgage brokers and inspectors
• The real estate board and MLS®, for property listing information, under the board's own rules
• Government authorities, when the law requires it. This includes reports to FINTRAC

This website and the services that support it are operated by providers that may store information on servers outside Canada, including in the United States. Information stored in another country may be accessible to the authorities of that country under its laws. This website is hosted by Vercel Inc., in the United States. This policy is updated whenever a new provider begins handling personal information on our behalf.

• Transaction and identification records: at least five years, counted from the day the last business transaction was conducted. This period is set by FINTRAC and is not ours to shorten.
• Information used to make a decision that directly affects you: at least one year, as PIPA requires, so that you have time to ask for access.
• Website enquiries and email subscribers: 24 months from your last contact with us, or until you ask us to delete them, whichever comes first.

When information is no longer needed for the purpose it was collected for, and no legal obligation requires us to keep it, it is securely destroyed.

We limit access to the people who need it to do the work, we use reputable providers with their own security controls, and we keep the number of copies small. No system is perfectly secure, and we do not claim otherwise. If a breach occurs that creates a real risk of significant harm, we will act on it and notify as the law requires.

Accuracy. If something we hold about you is wrong or out of date, tell us and we will correct it.

Access. You can ask what personal information we hold about you, how it has been used, and who it has been disclosed to. We will respond within 30 business days. In limited cases the law allows us to refuse; if that happens we will tell you why.

There is normally no charge. If a request takes significant time or copying, we may charge a minimal fee and we will tell you the amount before doing the work.

The person responsible for compliance with PIPA for Luis Alves REALTOR® is:

Please contact us first. We would rather fix a problem than have you go elsewhere with it.

If you are not satisfied with our response, you may complain to the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia:

This website is not directed at children and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under the age of majority in British Columbia.

If this policy changes, the new version is published on this page with a new date at the top. Material changes will be signalled clearly.

This English version is the official version of this policy. The Portuguese version is provided as a courtesy for Portuguese speaking clients. If the two versions differ, the English version governs.