Privacy Policy

BeforeYouBuy Homes, Inc. operates beforeyoubuy.homes, a property research service that assembles public-record and public-agency data into a single report about a US address. We are the controller of the personal information described here. Reach us at hello@beforeyoubuy.homes.

Information you give us.

• Email address — required to deliver a report and to let you return to it later.
• Name, phone number, and how you describe yourself (buyer, investor, agent) — only if you fill in those optional fields.
• Property addresses you search for, together with the normalized address we resolved them to. We keep these to build the report, to serve it from cache instead of paying to rebuild it, and to see which markets people ask about.
• Messages you send the in-report assistant, and any data problem you report through it, so we can correct the underlying record.

Information collected automatically.

• Standard web request data — IP address, browser and device type, pages viewed, and the referring page or campaign parameters that brought you here.
• One cookie of our own. byb_access remembers which reports you have unlocked, so you are not asked twice. It is not used for advertising.
• Google Analytics sets its own cookies to measure traffic; see section 4.
• If you accept advertising, Google AdSense sets its own cookies and similar identifiers on your device; see section 4a. If you decline or have not answered, no advertising script is loaded and none of those are set. Your answer itself is kept in your browser's local storage under byb_ads_consent and is never sent to us.

What we never collect. We do not ask for and never receive your Social Security number, date of birth, driver's licence, income, employment history, or credit file. We do not store card numbers — see section 4.

• To build, deliver and re-open the reports you request (performance of our contract).
• To take payment and honour refunds (performance of our contract).
• To email you about a report you generated or a subscription you hold (performance of our contract). Marketing email, if we ever send it, will be opt-in and separately unsubscribable.
• To keep the service working and honest — debugging, fraud and abuse prevention, rate limiting, and correcting data errors you report (legitimate interest).
• To understand aggregate demand by city and ZIP so we know where to add data coverage (legitimate interest).

We do not sell personal information — we do not exchange it for money, and we never have.

Advertising is different, and we would rather say it plainly than hide behind the word “sell”. If you accept ads, Google serves them on this site and reads its own cookies and identifiers on your device to do it. Under the California Consumer Privacy Act and the Texas Data Privacy and Security Act that counts as sharing personal information for cross-context behavioural advertising, and it is the one thing on this site you may want to opt out of. Opting out is the default: nothing advertising- related loads until you press Accept, and you can change your answer at any time in section 4a. Everything else in this policy — your email, your reports, your searches — is never shared for advertising, and no advertiser is shown the address you looked up.

We use a small number of processors. Each receives only what it needs, and none of them receives your data for their own marketing.

• Supabase — our database and file storage. Holds your email, report history and searches, encrypted at rest.
• Vercel — hosting and CDN. Processes request logs including IP address.
• Stripe — payments. Card details are entered on Stripe's own hosted checkout and never reach our servers; we receive only the last four digits, the card brand, and the status of the charge or subscription.
• Google Analytics — aggregate traffic measurement. It records page views and a truncated IP.
• Google Maps Platform — address autocomplete and geocoding. The address text you type is sent to Google to be resolved.
• Google AdSense — advertising, and only if you accept it. Unlike the others on this list it is not acting on our instructions with data we gave it: it is working with what it observes on your device. Section 4a covers it in full.

The report assistant runs on a language model we host ourselves. Your questions and the report contents are not sent to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or any other third-party model provider.

We will also disclose information where the law requires it, or to protect our rights or someone's safety. If the business is ever sold, your data may transfer with it, and we will say so here before that takes effect.

Reports are free, and advertising is what pays for them. Ads on this site are served by Google AdSense. Google — not us — decides which ad you see, and to do that it may use cookies and identifiers on your device together with what it already knows about your browsing elsewhere. We do not send Google your email, your report history, or the address you searched.

Nothing above happens unless you agree. Until you press Accept in the banner, the AdSense script is not loaded at all — not blocked after loading, not loaded in a limited mode: not requested. Declining costs you nothing; every report works the same either way.

Google's own description of what it collects when it serves ads is at policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites, and you can control personalised advertising across all sites at myadcenter.google.com.

We do not accept payment to change what a report says. No advertiser can raise a score, remove a risk, reorder a section, or have a property featured, and ads are labelled and kept outside the report itself.

The bulk of what appears in a report is not about you at all — it is public information about a parcel of land, gathered from county assessors and recorders, municipal permit systems, FEMA, the EPA, the FBI Crime Data Explorer, the US Census Bureau, state education agencies and similar public sources. Our methodology page lists them and says plainly where we have no source and therefore report nothing.

If you own or live at a property and believe something we display about it is wrong, write to hello@beforeyoubuy.homes. We will check it against the source record and correct or remove it. Note that we cannot change the underlying government record — for that you need the agency that publishes it, and we will tell you which one it is.

• Account and contact details — while your account is active, then up to 12 months, so a returning customer does not lose their report history.
• Generated reports — cached for about 7 days, after which the data is rebuilt from source on the next request. Reports you have purchased stay listed in your dashboard.
• Search records — retained in aggregate to plan coverage.
• Payment records — kept as long as tax and accounting law requires, generally seven years.

Wherever you live, you may ask us to show you the personal information we hold about you, correct it, delete it, or send you a copy in a portable format. Email hello@beforeyoubuy.homes from the address on the account and we will respond within 45 days. We will not charge you for this, and we will not treat you differently for asking.

If you are in California, Texas, Colorado, Virginia, Connecticut or another state with a comprehensive privacy law, those statutes give you these rights explicitly, plus the right to appeal a refusal — reply to our decision and a different person will review it. If you are in the EEA or UK, you may also object to processing based on legitimate interest and complain to your supervisory authority.

Data is encrypted in transit over TLS and at rest by our database provider. Access to production data is limited to the people who need it. No system is perfect; if a breach affects your information we will notify you and the relevant regulator as the law requires.

The service is for adults making property decisions. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18, and we will delete it if we learn we have.

If we change how we handle your data we will update this page and move the effective date at the top. Material changes will be emailed to account holders before they take effect.