Privacy Policy
Last updated: 29 July 2026 — Version 1.2
1. Who we are
Tenant Rank is a tenant screening service operated by Tenant Rank Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales (company number 17360046), registered office 6, 230, The Hey Sanderstead Road, South Croydon, CR2 0AJ.
We are registered with the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), registration number [ICO REGISTRATION NUMBER].
For questions about this policy or your data:
waleed.pti@gmail.com
In this policy, "we", "us" and "our" mean Tenant Rank Ltd. "You" means whoever is reading it — the sections below say which parts apply to whom.
2. Who this policy covers
Three different groups give us data, and we treat them differently:
- Landlords and letting agents — who create a listing and receive a ranked shortlist.
- Applicants — who complete a screening form for a specific property.
- Co-applicants — a second person who will be named on the same tenancy, invited by the lead applicant, who completes their own separate form.
Where a section applies to only one group, it says so.
3. Our role, and the landlord's
For the screening service itself — deciding what to collect, how documents are read, how scores are calculated — we are the data controller. We decide those things, not the landlord.
The landlord is a separate controller for their own decision about who to offer a tenancy to, and for any right to rent check they carry out. We do not make that decision and cannot make it for them.
This matters in a practical way: if you want to know why you were not selected, that is the landlord's decision and you should ask them. If you want to know how your score was calculated, that is ours, and section 7 explains it.
4. What we collect
From landlords and letting agents
| Data | Why |
|---|---|
| Name, email address, mobile number | To create and secure your account |
| Mobile number verification code | To confirm you are a real person — our main protection against fake listings |
| Property details: address, postcode, rent, availability, occupancy limit, pets and smoking rules | To build the listing and to score applicants against your actual requirements |
| Payment details | Handled entirely by our payment provider, Stripe — we never see or store your card number |
If you connect your Google account (landlords)
Auto-reply is optional. If you switch it on, you tick the portals your listing is advertised on and connect your Google account, so that replies to enquiries are sent from your own email address with your screening link.
| Data | Why |
|---|---|
| The email address of the Google account you connected | So you always know which account replies are sent from |
| The authorisation tokens Google issues | What lets us send on your behalf. Stored encrypted (section 14), deleted when you disconnect |
| The permissions you actually granted | So we never attempt anything you did not agree to |
| Which portals you ticked | So replies only ever go to enquiries from places you actually advertise |
The permission we request from Google is send-only. We ask for the ability to send email as you, and for your email address — nothing else. We do not request, hold, or use any permission to read, modify, delete or search anything in your mailbox, and Google's consent screen shows you exactly what is being granted before you agree. Detecting enquiries happens on our own systems, never inside your inbox.
What we send with it: replies to enquiries about your listing, containing your screening link. Nothing else — no marketing, nothing unrelated to the listing. Every message sent this way appears in your own Sent folder, so there is a complete record, in your hands, of everything done in your name.
Our use of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including its Limited Use requirements. In plain terms: data from your Google account is used only to provide the auto-reply feature you switched on. It is never used for advertising, never sold, never transferred to anyone except as needed to provide the feature or comply with the law, and never read by a human except with your permission, or where necessary for security or to comply with the law.
You can disconnect at any time — instantly yourself, from your Google account permissions page, or by emailing us — and we delete the stored tokens. Disconnecting stops auto-replies and nothing else; your listing and dashboard are unaffected.
From applicants and co-applicants
Collected directly from the form you complete:
| Data | Why |
|---|---|
| Full name, email address, mobile number | To identify your application and contact you about it |
| Email verification code | To confirm you are a real applicant and control access to the form |
| Household size, preferred move-in date, whether you have pets, whether you smoke, reason for moving | To score how well you fit the landlord's stated requirements |
| Employment status | To choose the right method for working out your income — a payslip, business cash flow, a pension, benefits or a student award are each calculated differently |
| Your current monthly rent or mortgage | So the housing cost you are about to stop paying is not counted against you on top of the new rent. Leaving it blank does not harm you; it only means one uplift cannot be calculated |
| Estimated annual income | Self-employed applicants only, as a sense check against your statements |
| Whether a co-applicant will be named on the tenancy, and if so their name and email address | To send them their own form. We contact them once, with a link |
Documents you upload:
| Document | Why |
|---|---|
| Photo ID (passport, driving licence or BRP) | To check the name on your application matches your identification |
| Most recent payslip (if employed) | To establish your income |
| Bank statements for the last three months | To verify that the income on your payslip actually arrives, and to assess affordability |
If the property is in England, we also ask whether you are a British or Irish citizen and, if not, for a right to rent share code and your date of birth. This is because the landlord is required by law to carry out a right to rent check on every adult who will live at the property. It has no effect whatsoever on your score or your ranking — see section 8.
What we extract from your documents
Your documents are read automatically. We keep only a summary, never the whole document's contents:
From a payslip: employer name, employee name, pay date, pay frequency, tax period number, gross and net pay for the period, and year-to-date gross pay.
We deliberately do not store your National Insurance number, even though it appears on most payslips.
From a bank statement: account holder name, bank name, the last four digits of the account number, the statement period, opening and closing balances, total money in, total money out, the number of transactions, and the dates of the first and last transaction. We also identify recurring credits — regular payments such as a salary, pension or benefit — and keep those.
We do not store your transaction history. Individual purchases, the shops you use, who you pay and what for — none of it is kept. See section 6, which explains why this boundary exists and why we will not move it.
5. Where your data comes from
Almost everything comes directly from you. Two exceptions:
- Co-applicants: your name and email address are given to us by the lead applicant, so that we can send you your own form. If they gave us your details and you do not want to take part, contact us at waleed.pti@gmail.com and we will delete them.
- Documents: the extracted figures in section 4 come from files you upload, read by an automated system.
We do not buy data about you, and we do not obtain it from credit reference agencies or any other third party as part of the screening service.
6. What we deliberately do not do
This section is not a legal requirement. It is here because these are real design decisions and you are entitled to know they were made.
We do not categorise your spending. We calculate two totals per month — money in and money out — and nothing else. We never look at what you spent money on. This is deliberate and permanent, because categorising transactions would infer things about you that we have no business knowing: religion from donations to a place of worship, health from payments to a clinic or pharmacy, pregnancy, trade union membership, addiction treatment. A "discretionary versus essential" split sounds neutral and is not — one person's discretionary spending is another person's disability-related cost.
We do not store your transaction ledger. Because we do not categorise it, we do not need to keep it. Only the aggregates in section 4 are retained.
We do not discount benefit income. Benefit income, including the housing element, is counted at its full value. Blanket refusals to let to people receiving benefits have been found unlawfully discriminatory in the UK, and a scoring system that quietly discounted benefit income would reproduce that discrimination through arithmetic instead of policy.
We do not score your immigration status. See section 8.
We do not send your documents to third-party AI services. Your documents are read by an automated system that we run ourselves, on our own hardware in the United Kingdom. No external AI provider receives your payslip, your bank statements or your ID.
We do not show landlords your documents by default. They receive a score, the reasoning behind it, and confirmation that documents were received — not your payslip or your bank statements.
There is a single tickbox at the end of the form, unticked when you arrive, which lets you allow the landlord to view the documents you uploaded. It is entirely optional: your score is calculated identically whether you tick it or not, and a landlord is shown whether you agreed or declined, never a reason. If you are applying jointly, you and your co-applicant each answer for your own documents — neither of you can consent on the other's behalf. You can withdraw this at any time by emailing us (section 12), and withdrawing is as easy as giving it was.
We do not sell your data, ever. Not to advertisers, not to data brokers, not to anyone.
7. Automated decision-making — and your right to a human
Your application is scored automatically. We think you should understand exactly what that means.
An automated system reads your documents and produces four scores — affordability, fit with the property, completeness of your application, and consistency between your documents — combined into one overall score out of 100. Applicants are then shown to the landlord in ranked order.
The score does not reject anyone. It ranks and it explains itself. Every warning it raises names its reason in plain English, so the landlord can look at the evidence and disagree with it. The decision about who gets the tenancy is made by the landlord, by a person, not by us and not by the algorithm.
We keep a record of the arithmetic behind every score, so it can be explained after the fact rather than reconstructed.
You have the right to ask for human review. If a score has been calculated about you and you believe it is wrong — a document was misread, a figure was extracted incorrectly, your circumstances were misunderstood — you can contact us at waleed.pti@gmail.com and ask a person to look at it. You can give us your point of view, and you can contest the result. We will re-examine the underlying documents and correct the score where it is wrong.
8. Right to rent — collected, never scored
If the property is in England, the landlord must legally check that every adult living there has the right to rent. We help collect that evidence.
It never touches your score. Nationality, immigration status, share codes and date of birth are excluded from the scoring system entirely — not weighted low, but absent from it. The system that calculates scores has no access to them.
Share codes and dates of birth are stored encrypted, separately from the rest of your application data, and are used for exactly one thing: passing to the landlord so they can carry out the check the law requires of them. They are deleted with the rest of your application data on the schedule in section 11.
This applies equally to every applicant. It is a legal obligation on the landlord, not an assessment of you.
9. Our lawful bases for using your data
| What we do | Lawful basis (UK GDPR Article 6) |
|---|---|
| Create and run a landlord account | Contract |
| Verify a phone number or email address with a one-time code | Legitimate interests — preventing fraudulent listings and applications |
| Score an application and rank it for the landlord | Legitimate interests — landlords need a fair, consistent way to compare applicants, and applicants benefit from being assessed on evidence rather than on who wrote the best message |
| Read uploaded documents to verify income | Legitimate interests, as above |
| Collect right to rent evidence | Legal obligation on the landlord under the Immigration Act 2014 |
| Send reminders about an unfinished application | Legitimate interests |
| Take payment | Contract |
| Keep records to defend a decision if challenged | Legal obligation, and legitimate interests |
| Show the landlord the documents you uploaded | Consent — the optional tickbox in section 6, and nothing else. We do not rely on legitimate interests for this |
| Send auto-replies from a landlord's connected Google account | Consent — you connect the account yourself on Google's own screen, and can revoke it at Google or with us at any time |
Where we rely on legitimate interests, we have weighed our interests against your rights. You can object at any time (section 12), and you can ask for our assessment.
Where we rely on consent — showing an applicant's documents to a landlord, and sending from a landlord's connected Google account — you can withdraw it at any time without giving a reason. Withdrawing has no effect on an applicant's score, and disconnecting Google has no effect on a landlord's listing.
Special category data. We do not ask for information about your health, religion, ethnicity, political opinions, trade union membership, sex life or sexual orientation, and we do not want it. Bank statements can incidentally reveal such things, which is precisely why we do not categorise or store transactions (section 6). If special category data reaches us incidentally, we do not use it, and it is deleted with the rest of your data on the schedule in section 11.
10. Who we share your data with
We use the following service providers, who process data on our instructions and are contractually bound to protect it:
| Provider | What they handle |
|---|---|
| Supabase | Database and encrypted document storage |
| Railway | Running the application |
| Vonage | Sending SMS verification codes — receives a phone number only |
| Resend | Sending emails — receives an email address only |
| Stripe | Landlord payments — we never see card details |
Documents are read by an automated system we operate ourselves in the United Kingdom — no external provider is involved (section 6).
We share with the landlord: your name, your email address and phone number, the answers you gave on the form, your score and its four components, the reasons behind any warnings, the income figure we verified, and confirmation of which documents you provided. Not your documents themselves, unless you tick the box described in section 6.
Your contact details are shown to the landlord only when they deliberately open them, and they are given for one purpose: contacting you about the property you applied for. The landlord is a separate data controller (section 3) and is responsible for their own use of them. Where a right to rent check applies, the landlord also receives the evidence in section 8, because carrying out that check is their legal duty.
We may disclose data if required by law, a court order, or to establish or defend a legal claim.
We do not sell your data or share it for marketing.
11. How long we keep your data
| Data | Retained |
|---|---|
| Application, documents and scores | Until 30 days after the listing closes, then deleted automatically. Listings close after 100 applications or 30 days, whichever comes first |
| Landlord account | While your account is open, then deleted within 12 months of closure |
| Google connection tokens | Until you disconnect or revoke access at Google, and in any case deleted with your account |
| Records needed for legal or accounting purposes | As required by law — typically 6 years for financial records |
| Right to rent evidence | Deleted with your application data, above. The landlord must retain their own copy for the tenancy plus one year; their copy is their responsibility |
Deletion removes your documents from storage and your data from our database. It is not a flag — the records are removed.
12. Your rights
Under UK GDPR you have the right to:
- Be told how your data is used — this document
- Access a copy of your data
- Correct anything inaccurate
- Erasure — ask us to delete your data
- Restrict how we use it while a concern is resolved
- Portability — receive your data in a machine-readable format
- Object to processing based on legitimate interests, including scoring
- Human review of an automated score, and to contest it (section 7)
- Withdraw consent, where we relied on it
To exercise any of these, email waleed.pti@gmail.com. We respond within one month.
You will never be charged for making a request, and making one will not disadvantage your application.
Worth knowing: if you ask us to delete your data while your application is live, we will do it — but the landlord will no longer be able to consider you for that property, because there will be nothing left to consider. We will tell you that before acting.
13. Where your data is held
Our database and document storage are hosted by Supabase, and the application runs on Railway, in each case within the UK or the European Economic Area. Documents are read by an automated system running on our own hardware in the United Kingdom.
Where a provider processes data in the EEA rather than the UK, that transfer is covered by the UK adequacy regulations for the EEA. If we ever use a provider that processes data outside the UK and EEA, we will put the UK International Data Transfer Addendum in place and update this section.
14. How we protect your data
- Documents are stored in private storage that is not publicly reachable. There is no public URL for your payslip. The storage layer refuses anonymous requests outright rather than relying on the address being hard to guess.
- Uploads go directly from your browser to encrypted storage over a single-use signed link.
- In transit, everything travels over HTTPS (TLS). At rest, storage and database are encrypted by our infrastructure provider using AES-256.
- Google connection tokens are never stored readable. They get the same field-level AES-256-GCM treatment described below, so a copy of the database contains no usable credential for anyone's email account.
- Right to rent share codes and dates of birth get a second, independent layer: before they reach the database we encrypt each value with AES-256-GCM, using a key held only in our application's server environment and never stored in the database. GCM is an authenticated cipher, so a value that had been tampered with would fail to decrypt rather than decrypt to something misleading. Anyone who obtained a copy of the database — including our own database administrators — would find these fields unreadable without that separate key. If the key is ever missing, we discard the share code rather than store it unprotected.
- We do not operate a key-rotation cycle, and that is deliberate: applicant records exist for at most about two months (section 11), so a new key simply takes over and the data encrypted under the old one is deleted in the normal course.
- Access is restricted at the database level, not just in the interface: a landlord can only ever read data belonging to their own listings, enforced by the database itself.
- We collect the minimum we need, which is the most effective protection of all — data we never hold cannot be lost.
No system is perfectly secure. If a breach occurs that risks your rights, we will tell the ICO within 72 hours and notify you directly where the risk is high.
15. Cookies
We use only cookies that are strictly necessary for the service to work — keeping you signed in and keeping the service secure. We do not use advertising or tracking cookies, and we do not use third-party analytics that track you across other websites.
16. Children
Tenant Rank is not intended for anyone under 18. We do not knowingly collect data about children. If you believe we have, contact us and we will delete it.
17. Changes to this policy
If we make a material change, we will update the date at the top and notify affected users by email where we can. Continuing to use the service after a change means you accept the updated policy.
18. Complaints
If you are unhappy with how we have handled your data, please tell us first at waleed.pti@gmail.com — we would rather fix it directly.
You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at any time:
Information Commissioner's Office
Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire SK9 5AF
Helpline: 0303 123 1113
ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint