What we collect, and why

When you inquire

The inquiry form sends us your name, your email address, your phone number if you give one, your message and the buildings you asked about. If you fill them in, it also sends your company, the kind of investor you are and your budget. With it we record the page you sent it from and the currency you were viewing prices in.

We use these details to answer you and to handle the transaction you asked about. If you ask to be introduced to a seller, we pass on only what is needed for that introduction.

When you sign up for alerts

The alerts form keeps your email address, your name if you give it, and the cities, price limit and kind of building you chose. We send a confirmation email first; alerts start only after you click the link in it. Every alert has an unsubscribe link, and unsubscribing stops the emails at once.

When you sign the brokerage order

Israeli law requires a real-estate broker to hold a written brokerage order, signed by the client, in order to be owed a fee. When you sign ours on this site, we keep: your full name, your ID or passport number, your address and your email address; your signature, as drawn on screen or typed; the wording you signed, its version and its language; the time you signed; and the building the order covers. From these we make a PDF of the signed order.

We keep the order to show that it was given, to collect or defend our fee, and to meet our duties as a licensed broker. Your ID or passport number appears only in the order itself and in the copy emailed to you; it is not included in the notifications we send ourselves about your inquiry.

The signed PDF is kept in private storage that only IsraelBuilding can reach, in a copy on our office computer, and in the sent-mail folder of our Gmail account. We keep a signed order for seven years after the purchase is completed or the order ends, the general limitation period for civil claims in Israel, and then delete it. We cannot delete it earlier on request, because we may need it to show that the order was given.

Page views

We count how often each building page is opened, so that we know which buildings draw interest. The count uses no cookies. To keep one visitor from being counted many times, and to limit automated inquiries, the site computes a short code from the network address of the request and the date. The code changes every day and the address itself is not stored. A page view is stored with that code and nothing else about you; an inquiry is stored with the code of the day it was sent.

What stays in your browser

Your shortlist, the currency you chose and whether you last looked at cards or the table are saved in your own browser so that the site remembers them on your next visit. They are not sent to us, except that the buildings on your shortlist are included when you send an inquiry about them. Clearing your browser's site data removes them.

If you choose a language with the language switcher, a small cookie remembers it, so that the site opens in that language on your next visit. It holds the language and nothing else.

Where it is kept

Inquiries, signed orders, alert sign-ups and page-view counts are stored in a hosted database (Supabase), in its data center in Zurich, Switzerland; access to it is restricted to IsraelBuilding. Inquiries and signed orders are also copied to our office computer, where we handle them. The website itself is served by Vercel, which, like any web host, processes the network address of each request in order to deliver the page. Emails we send (confirmations, alerts and copies of signed orders) go out through Google's Gmail service.

A few things are loaded from other services when you use them, and those services then see your network address: map tiles from CARTO and the map software from unpkg when you open a map, and, if our own rate service cannot be reached when you switch currency, exchange rates from frankfurter.dev.

Seeing or deleting your details

You can ask at any time what we hold about you, have it corrected or have it deleted. Write to desk@israelbuilding.com from the address you used with us. We delete inquiries and alert sign-ups on request, unless the law requires us to keep a record of a transaction.