Privacy policy
Last update : November 2024
The purpose of this privacy policy is to inform you about how Montaigne Properties collects, uses, stores and protects your personal data in connection with our property services in Dubai. By using our website or contacting us, you agree to the terms of this privacy policy.
Montaigne Properties is committed to respecting the confidentiality of your personal information and ensuring its protection in accordance with the laws in force in the United Arab Emirates, in particular the Dubai Data Protection Regulations and the Dubai Data Law guidelines.
Identity of the data controller
The party responsible for processing your personal data is Montaigne Properties, whose registered office is located at Al Fattan Downtown, Dubai, United Arab Emirates. You can contact us by email at the following address contact@montaigne-properties.com or by telephone on +971 56 141 3549 if you have any questions about the protection of your personal data.
Type of data collected
In the course of our real estate activities, we may collect various categories of personal data about you. This data includes your identification information such as your surname, first name, nationality, date of birth, passport number or Emirates ID if you are resident in the United Arab Emirates. We also collect your contact details including your postal address, email address, mobile and landline telephone numbers. As part of your property search, we collect information about your search criteria, including the type of property you are looking for, your investment budget, desired location, desired surface area and your specific preferences. If you carry out a property transaction through us, we also collect financial information such as your bank statements, proof of income, financing information and property transaction history.
We also collect navigation data when you consult our website, including your IP address, the type of browser used, the pages consulted, the duration of the visit, the links clicked and your navigation path. All communications you have with our agency are also archived, including emails exchanged, recordings of telephone calls where permitted by law and where you have been informed, messages via our contact form, and the history of your interactions with our estate agents.
Data collection methods
Your personal data is collected in different ways depending on your interaction with our services. Direct collection occurs when you fill in our contact forms on our website, when you contact us by telephone, email or via our social networks, when you subscribe to our newsletter, during property visits, when you sign search or sale mandates, and during the property transaction process. We also collect information indirectly through cookies and similar technologies when you browse our website, through our business partners where you have given them consent to share your information, and through public registers and professional databases in the property sector where this is legally permitted.
Purposes of processing your data
Your personal data is processed for a number of legitimate purposes in connection with our real estate activities. We use your information to manage and process your enquiries about our properties, to offer you properties that match your search criteria, to organise and monitor property visits, and to provide you with personalised advice on property investment in Dubai. As part of the management of property transactions, your data enables us to prepare sale or rental contracts, coordinate with property developers, notaries and banking institutions, carry out the necessary checks prior to the transaction, and ensure post-transaction follow-up until the handover of the keys.
We also use your data for marketing communication purposes, subject to your prior consent, to send you our newsletter containing the latest real estate news from Dubai, to inform you of our new offers and investment opportunities, to invite you to our events and private visits, and to send you personalised content according to your areas of interest. Your data is also used to improve our services, including analysing the performance of our website, customer satisfaction surveys, improving our service offering and training our teams. Finally, we process your data to comply with our legal and regulatory obligations, including compliance with the requirements of the RERA (Real Estate Regulatory Agency), obligations to combat money laundering and the financing of terrorism, keeping accounting and tax documents, and responding to requests from the competent authorities.
Legal basis for processing
There are several legal bases for processing your personal data, depending on the purpose. Your consent is the legal basis for sending marketing communications, using non-essential cookies and sharing your data with third-party partners. The performance of the contract justifies the processing of your data where this is necessary for the provision of our property services, the management of your property search, the preparation and execution of property transactions and the monitoring of your customer file. We also process your data on the basis of our legitimate interests, in particular to improve our services, secure our IT systems, manage our commercial relationship and defend our rights in the event of a dispute. Finally, some processing is based on our legal obligations, including keeping documents for the regulatory authorities, combating fraud and money laundering, and responding to legal requests.
Recipients of your data
As part of our activities and the completion of your property transaction, your personal data may be shared with various recipients. Internally, only the members of our team directly involved in processing your file have access to your personal information. Our property advisers, our administrative department, our management and our marketing department, for communications to which you have consented, may have access to your data strictly within the scope of their duties.
We also share your data with our external partners when this is necessary for the completion of your property project. Property developers and promoters have access to your information when you express an interest in their projects. Banks and financial institutions receive your details when you apply for a mortgage. Law firms and notaries involved in your property transactions have access to the information they need to ensure the legal security of your purchase. Insurance companies receive the data they need to draw up your home insurance policies. Regulatory authorities, such as RERA and the Dubai Land Department, receive the information they need to register property transactions.
We also use technical service providers to run our business. Our web host OVH provides hosting and maintenance for our website. Digital marketing service providers manage our online advertising campaigns. CRM solution providers securely store and manage our customer database. Emailing services send out our newsletters and communications. Web analysis service providers enable us to analyse the performance of our site and visitor behaviour.
We guarantee that all these recipients are bound by strict confidentiality and security obligations. They may only use your data for the specific purposes for which it was communicated to them and in accordance with our instructions. We will never sell your personal data to third parties or use it for purposes incompatible with those for which it was collected.
International data transfers
In the course of our activities, some of your personal data may be transferred or stored outside the United Arab Emirates, in particular in Europe where our web host OVH is located. When your data is transferred internationally, we ensure that appropriate safeguards are in place to ensure an adequate level of protection. These safeguards include the signing of standard contractual clauses approved by the competent authorities, the use of recognised certifications such as the Privacy Shield framework where applicable, and verification that the recipient countries offer a level of data protection considered adequate.
We ensure that our service providers located outside the United Arab Emirates comply with data protection standards equivalent to those in force in Dubai and that they implement all technical and organisational measures necessary to protect your personal information against unauthorised access, loss or disclosure.
Data retention period
The length of time we keep your personal data varies according to the purpose of the processing and our legal obligations. For active customers who have carried out a property transaction through us, we retain your data for the duration of the commercial relationship and for up to ten years after the last transaction, in accordance with the legal obligations to retain commercial and accounting documents in the United Arab Emirates. In the case of prospects and potential customers who have not completed a transaction, your data will be kept for a period of three years from the date of your last contact with us or your last expression of interest, unless you object.
Browsing data and cookies are kept for a maximum of thirteen months in accordance with the recommendations of the data protection authorities. Recordings of telephone calls, when made, are kept for a period of six months, except in the event of a dispute, when they may be kept until the dispute has been fully resolved. Data collected for commercial canvassing purposes is kept for three years from the date of collection or the last contact from you.
At the end of these retention periods, your personal data is either permanently deleted from our systems or irreversibly anonymised for statistical purposes. We carry out regular reviews of our databases to ensure that only data that is necessary and for which we have a legal basis is retained.
Security and protection of your data
Montaigne Properties implements all appropriate technical and organisational measures to guarantee the security and confidentiality of your personal data against unauthorised access, modification, disclosure or destruction. Technically, we use the HTTPS protocol with SSL certificate to secure all data transmissions between your browser and our servers. Our databases are encrypted and protected by high-performance firewalls. Access to our IT systems is strictly controlled using strong personal identifiers and passwords, supplemented by two-factor authentication for sensitive access. We make regular, secure back-ups of our data, stored on separate, geographically distant servers.
From an organisational point of view, access to your personal data is strictly limited to those employees who need it to carry out their duties. All our employees are trained in data protection principles and are bound by strict confidentiality clauses. We have implemented internal data security policies and procedures, which are regularly updated and audited. In the event of a personal data breach likely to result in a high risk to your rights and freedoms, we undertake to inform you as soon as possible and to notify the competent authorities in accordance with the regulations in force.
We also require all our service providers and partners to implement equivalent security measures, and we contractually ensure that they comply with data protection standards. Security audits are carried out regularly to check the effectiveness of our measures and identify any vulnerabilities.
Your rights regarding your personal data
In accordance with the data protection regulations in force in the United Arab Emirates, you have a number of rights in relation to your personal data. You have a right of access which enables you to obtain confirmation as to whether or not data relating to you is being processed and, if so, to access this data as well as information concerning the purposes of the processing, the categories of data processed, the recipients of this data and the planned storage period.
You also have the right to rectify any inaccurate or incomplete data concerning you. The right to erasure, also known as the right to be forgotten, allows you to request the deletion of your personal data when it is no longer necessary for the purposes for which it was collected, when you withdraw your consent and there is no other legal basis for the processing, when you object to the processing and there is no compelling legitimate reason for the processing, or when your data has been processed unlawfully.
The right to object allows you to object at any time, on grounds relating to your particular situation, to the processing of your data based on our legitimate interests. You may also object at any time, without giving any reason, to the processing of your data for commercial prospecting purposes. The right to the restriction of processing allows you to obtain the restriction of the processing of your data in certain circumstances, in particular when you contest the accuracy of your data for the time necessary to verify it, or when you have objected to the processing for the time necessary to verify our legitimate interests.
You also have a right to the portability of your data, allowing you to receive the personal data you have provided to us in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format, and to transmit it to another data controller where the processing is based on your consent or on a contract and is carried out using automated processes. Finally, you have the right to withdraw your consent at any time where the processing is based on it, without this calling into question the lawfulness of the processing carried out prior to the withdrawal of consent.
To exercise any of these rights, you can send us your request by email to contact@montaigne-properties.com or by post to our address at Al Fattan Downtown, Dubai. We will respond within a maximum of thirty days from receipt of your request. In order to ensure the security of your data, we may ask you to provide us with a copy of a valid form of identification to verify your identity before proceeding with your request. If you consider that your rights have not been respected, you also have the right to lodge a complaint with the competent data protection authority in the United Arab Emirates.
Cookies and similar technologies
Our website uses cookies and similar technologies to improve your browsing experience, analyse the use of our site and offer you personalised content. A cookie is a small text file placed on your terminal when you visit our site. The cookies we use fall into several categories depending on their purpose.
Strictly necessary cookies are essential for the proper operation of our website. They enable you to browse the site and use its essential functions, such as access to secure areas. These cookies do not collect any information that could identify you and cannot be deactivated in our systems. Performance cookies enable us to count visits and sources of traffic in order to measure and improve the performance of our site. They help us to know which pages are the most and least popular and to understand how visitors navigate the site. All the information collected by these cookies is aggregated and therefore anonymised.
Functionality cookies enable our site to remember the choices you make, such as your preferred language or the region you are in, in order to offer you a more personalised experience. Targeting or advertising cookies may be placed on our site by our advertising partners. They may be used by these companies to establish a profile of your centres of interest and to offer you relevant advertising on other sites. They do not directly store personal information but are based on the unique identification of your browser and your Internet device.
In particular, we use Google Analytics to analyse the audience for our site, Facebook Pixel to optimise our advertising campaigns on the social networks, and session management cookies to keep your connection active during browsing. On your first visit to our site, you will be asked to accept or reject non-essential cookies. You can change your cookie preferences at any time via your browser settings. Deactivating certain cookies may affect your browsing experience and limit access to certain features of our site.
Links to third-party sites
Our website may contain hyperlinks to third party websites, including websites of property developers, banking institutions or our partners. Montaigne Properties has no control over these external sites and accepts no responsibility for their content, availability or privacy practices. We recommend that you consult the privacy policies of these third party sites before providing them with your personal data, as their practices may differ from ours and are not covered by this privacy policy.
Changes to the privacy policy
Montaigne Properties reserves the right to modify this privacy policy at any time to reflect changes in our data processing practices, changes in applicable law or improvements to our services. Any substantial modification will be brought to your attention by means of a visible notice on our website or by email if we have your contact details. We encourage you to check this page regularly for any updates. The date of the last modification is indicated at the top of this document. Your continued use of our services following the posting of changes constitutes your acceptance of those changes.
Contact and questions
If you have any questions about this privacy policy, the exercise of your rights, or any concerns relating to the processing of your personal data, you can contact us in the following ways. By email to contact@montaigne-properties.com, by telephone on +971 56 141 3549 from Sunday to Thursday from 9am to 6pm, or by post to the following address: Montaigne Properties, Al Fattan Downtown, Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
We undertake to respond to all your requests as quickly as possible and to provide you with all the necessary assistance concerning the protection of your personal data. Our team is available to clarify our confidentiality practices and to assist you in exercising your rights. Our team is at your disposal for any clarification on our confidentiality practices and to assist you in exercising your rights.
