Privacy policy

ERFDEVCO (Erfdevco Farm Sales, company registration 2022/597497/07, PPRA firm registration 202614025250000) is the responsible party. It is a property practitioner registered with the Property Practitioners Regulatory Authority, at 53 Steenbok, Kleinbaai, 7220, in the Western Cape.

Martiens Du Plessis is the Information Officer under the Protection of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013 (POPIA). Reach him on 082 900 5019 or at martiens@erfdevco.com. Privacy matters may also be sent to erfdevco@gmail.com, the address named in the website terms.

This policy covers personal information handled through this website (the enquiry and contact forms, the reception chat and the pages you visit) and personal information handled in the course of ERFDEVCO's work as a property practitioner: enquiries, mandates, offers, sales and the checks the law requires around them. It applies to buyers, sellers, owners, tenants, landlords and anyone acting for them.

The website terms and conditions sit alongside it.

What you type into a form. The contact form collects your name, email address, phone number if you give one, the province and reason you select, and the message you write. The enquiry form on a farm page collects your name, email address, phone number if you give one, and your message.

What you type into the reception chat. The words of the conversation, and, if you leave them, your name, a phone number and what you are looking for.

What a transaction requires. Where an enquiry becomes a mandate, an offer or a sale, the law obliges a property practitioner to collect and verify more: proof of identity, a residential or business address, tax information, proof of ownership or authority to act, company, close corporation or trust documents and the people behind them, and, where required, the source of funds. Section 8 of the website terms lists this in full. These documents are given to us directly, never through the website.

Voluntary, except where the law says otherwise. Using the forms and the chat is your choice, and you can phone instead. For a mandate or a sale the FICA documents are required by law: without them we cannot take the mandate or carry the transaction through, as section 8.3 of the website terms says.

From the other side of a transaction. Where you buy or sell through us, some of your personal information reaches us from the other party, their agent, the conveyancer or the bank, as the transaction requires.

One technical detail. If you use the reception chat, its server reads your internet (IP) address to stop one connection sending more than twenty messages in ten minutes. Our code keeps that address only in the server's working memory, never stores it and never links it to you, and it is gone when that server restarts. Like any web host, Vercel also handles your address in order to deliver each page. Beyond that, this site sets no analytics, no advertising pixels and no tracking cookies.

To answer you. An enquiry or a chat message is a request from you, and answering it is why the information was given.

To carry out a mandate or a sale. Where you list a property with us or make an offer, we use your information to perform that agreement: to market the property, to communicate with the other side, the conveyancer and the bank, and to see the transaction through.

Because the law requires it. The Financial Intelligence Centre Act 38 of 2001 (FICA) and the Property Practitioners Act 22 of 2019 oblige us to identify and verify clients, to keep records and to report where the law says so.

To keep proper records and prevent fraud. A record of enquiries and transactions is kept in ERFDEVCO's legitimate interest as a regulated business, and information is checked where something looks false or misleading.

Marketing, only with your say-so. We do not add anyone to a marketing list because they enquired. If you ask to hear about new farms, you can stop at any time by replying to a message or phoning Martiens, and we will stop.

We do not sell, rent or trade personal information, and no decision about you is made by a machine alone.

A message sent through this site is emailed to the ERFDEVCO mailbox and read by Martiens. Beyond him, personal information reaches only:

• the services that carry it: the web host that delivers every page and form (Vercel), the email host that carries the message (Hostinger), the language model that answers the reception chat if you use it (Anthropic), and WhatsApp (Meta) if you choose to message us there;
• the people a transaction needs, when you ask us to deal with them for you: the other party to the sale, the conveyancer, a bank or bond originator, a valuer or an inspector;
• the authorities, where the law obliges a property practitioner to report or to answer a lawful request: the Financial Intelligence Centre, the Property Practitioners Regulatory Authority, the South African Revenue Service or a court.

Details of a property for sale, such as its photographs, size, price and features, are published on this site and may be published on property portals we advertise on. Your personal information is not part of that.

Your shortlist and your comparison selection are stored in your browser under erfdevco:shortlist and erfdevco:compare. They never reach us and never leave the device. Clearing your browser data removes them, and nothing on the site depends on them.

The reception chat keeps its conversation, and the fact that its bubble has already shown, in this tab's own session storage, so the box does not start again on every page; nothing personal is in it unless you type it. Session storage is emptied when you close the tab.

Everything this page needs comes from erfdevco.com: the typefaces, the photographs, the map and all listing data. Nothing is fetched from Google, and there is no analytics, advertising or tracking service of any kind.

The one exception is the reception chat, and only if you open it and type. What you type is sent to our own /api/chat endpoint and from there to Anthropic, which runs the language model that answers, so Anthropic processes the words of that conversation. It is not used to train a model. If you leave your name, a phone number and what you are looking for, those three details are emailed to Martiens as an enquiry; the rest of the conversation is not. If that email cannot be sent, the same three details are written to the web host's error log instead, so the enquiry is not lost; the host deletes those logs automatically within a day. The rest of the site works without ever opening it.

This site is hosted by Vercel, a United States company, and every form you send and every chat message you type is processed on its servers in Washington, D.C. on the way to us. The words of a reception chat are also processed by Anthropic, a United States company, to write the replies. The ERFDEVCO mailbox that receives an enquiry is hosted by Hostinger, which is based outside South Africa too. So personal information you send through this website is transferred out of South Africa.

It goes only to those services, only to carry your message to us or to answer your chat, and each of them holds it under its own published privacy and data-protection terms, which give it protection substantially similar to POPIA. If you would rather it did not leave the country, phone Martiens on 082 900 5019 instead of using the forms or the chat. WhatsApp is carried by Meta, which is also outside South Africa.

The site is served over HTTPS only, so a form or a chat message is encrypted on its way to us. The mailbox that receives enquiries is password-protected and read by Martiens. Documents received for a transaction are kept for that transaction and for the period the law requires, and no longer. Access is limited to the people who need it for the work described on this page.

If personal information is ever lost, accessed or disclosed without authority, we will tell the Information Regulator and the people affected as POPIA requires.

An enquiry that does not lead anywhere is kept for two years and then deleted. Where an enquiry becomes a mandate or a sale, the record is kept for five years from the end of that transaction, which is the period the Financial Intelligence Centre Act requires of a property practitioner. Information is deleted or de-identified when that period ends, unless the law requires it to be kept longer.

Under POPIA you may ask what we hold about you and get a copy, ask for it to be corrected or deleted, object to its use, withdraw consent you have given, and refuse marketing. Ask on 082 900 5019 or at martiens@erfdevco.com. We act within 30 days, the period the Promotion of Access to Information Act allows, and tell you when it is done. Where the law asks for a prescribed form (Form 1 to object, Form 2 to correct or delete), we send it to you to sign; a phone call or an email is enough to start. Where the law obliges us to keep a record, such as a FICA record, we will tell you that too.

If you are not satisfied, you may complain to the Information Regulator of South Africa: POPIAComplaints@inforegulator.org.za, inforegulator.org.za, Woodmead North Office Park, 54 Maxwell Drive, Woodmead, Johannesburg, 2191.

This site and our services are for people aged 18 and over, as the website terms require. We do not knowingly collect personal information from a child; if a child's information reaches us, we delete it once we know.

If what we collect or what we do with it changes, this page changes with it and the date below is updated. There is no version buried elsewhere.