Renterly Data Use Policy

1.1 Tenant-submitted information

Current and former tenants can submit:

• Reviews of a building or unit, covering their own experience
• Rent history (amount paid, period, unit type)
• Structured factual reports (maintenance, communication, condition)

Submissions are attributed to a pseudonymous account, never to a real name.

1.2 Tenant-submitted supporting documents

A contributor may optionally upload a document — typically a partial lease — to support a contribution, for example to establish who the landlord was at a property.

We confirm, then delete. A document is reviewed to confirm the landlord name and the tenancy period, those fields are recorded, and the document itself is deleted once the contribution is approved. We do not retain leases, and we do not keep a copy in any archive.

Where a document contains a tenant name, that name is not recorded. See section 2.1.

Uploaded documents are never shown to landlords, never made public, and never provided to any third party.

There is no charge for this. Confirming that a document names a particular landlord at a particular address is a short check.

1.3 Public records

We process records published by government bodies and tribunals, including:

• Ontario Landlord and Tenant Board orders, from the LTB Order Catalogue published on data.ontario.ca under the Open Government Licence – Ontario
• British Columbia Residential Tenancy Branch monetary orders and administrative penalties
• Municipal property standards and licensing data, including RentSafeTO, the Vancouver Rental Standards Database, and the City of Mississauga's Rental Standards Program data, used under the City of Mississauga's open data Terms of Use

How we process tribunal records. We use artificial intelligence to extract structured data — outcome, date, file number, application type, address, and the landlord party where applicable. We do not republish decisions in full. Tenant party names are discarded at the ingest stage and are never written to our database. See section 3.1.

1.4 Contributor information

Reviews and rent reports are published without any name attached. We do not ask for a contributor's name, and there is no name field on a review.

For each contribution we store an email address, and a record of how the submission was made:

• An email address, used once to confirm the contribution before it is published, and to prevent the same address being used to submit repeatedly for the same property
• The IP address the contribution was submitted from, and the wider network block that address sits in
• Behavioural and technical information about the submission, held for anti-abuse purposes

Each submission is recorded separately: correcting a review adds a second record rather than overwriting the first.

Why we hold this. The most damaging thing that can happen to a review site is fake reviews, and the person with the strongest motive to leave them is a landlord writing about their own buildings, or about a competitor's. None of the above identifies anyone on its own. Together it lets us see that several reviews across several properties came from one place — particularly when those properties turn out to share a landlord. We do not describe these checks in detail, because doing so would help the people they exist to stop.

What we do not do. We do not fingerprint devices, track anyone across other websites, run advertising, build profiles, or sell or share any of this.

None of it is displayed publicly, and none of it is disclosed to landlords — including landlords with a verified claim or an Enhanced listing — under any circumstances short of a court order (see section 9).

The contribution form also carries an anti-bot challenge provided by Cloudflare. Completing it shares the IP address and a one-time token with Cloudflare for that check.

We do not collect a contributor's name, phone number, date of birth, address of residence, or any government identifier.

1.5 Account information

For registered accounts: email address and authentication credentials. For landlord subscribers: billing information handled by our payment processor. We do not store full payment card details.

This is the part of our design we have thought hardest about, so we set it out in full.

2.1 Tenants — never named

Renterly does not capture, store, index, display or disclose tenant names, in any product, in any tier, under any circumstances.

Where a tribunal record names a tenant, that name is removed during ingest and is not written to our database. There is no internal table, no archive, and no export containing it. No payment unlocks it, because it does not exist for us to unlock.

This is a permanent architectural commitment, not a current setting.

2.2 Corporate landlords — public and searchable

Names of corporations, numbered companies, partnerships, real estate investment trusts, and property management firms are:

• Displayed publicly, without an account
• Indexable by search engines

Canadian privacy legislation protects individuals, not corporations. A company that owns or manages rental housing is a business, and information about how it operates that housing is information the public is entitled to weigh.

2.3 Individual landlords — account required

Names of individual (non-incorporated) landlords are:

• Visible only to signed-in users
• Not included in pages accessible to search engine crawlers
• Not included in URLs, page titles, meta descriptions, social preview cards, or sitemaps

Why we record the individual landlord at all. Properties change hands. If a record were attached only to an address, every history would follow the building forever, with no way to tell whether what a tenant described happened under the person who owns it now or the person who owned it before.

Recording the landlord named on each record is what makes that distinction possible at all. Without a name, there is nothing to correct against and no way to separate one owner's conduct from another's.

What we do and do not know. We do not hold land registry data, and we do not look at a company's holding companies or shareholders. We confirm who owns a property only when a landlord claims it: verifying that claim is the one point at which we check ownership ourselves (see section 5.3).

What we hold is the landlord named on each individual record: the landlord party identified on a tribunal order as at the date of that order, or the landlord identified by a tenant in a review or rent report as at the time of that tenancy.

How this appears on the site. Every landlord name is shown with the source it came from — for example, from a tribunal order. We label a name as "Landlord," never as "current landlord" or "owner," because a name on a record is not evidence of who owns a property today.

A name on a property page therefore means: this is the landlord identified on the record cited beside it. Nothing more.

If ownership has changed. A new owner, a former owner, or anyone acting for either can have the record corrected. See section 4.

Naming the individual is a precision measure, not an exposure measure. It exists so a record can be attached to the right person, and corrected when it is not.

Why access requires an account. An individual landlord is a person, and remains a person even while operating a rental business. Requiring an account means the information reaches people with a genuine housing interest without producing incidental reputational effects for anyone who happens to search that person's name for unrelated reasons.

Access is conditioned on agreeing not to republish this information and not to use it for any screening decision.

2.4 Named individuals in reviews

Reviewers may refer to a landlord or property manager in that role. They may not name any other person — not other tenants, not neighbours, not building staff, not family members. See the Review Policy.

We are asked this often, and the asymmetry is deliberate.

The consequences are not comparable. When information causes a tenant to be refused housing, the result is a person without a home — a necessity of life, in a market with limited supply, where one refusal makes the next harder. When information causes a landlord to be refused a tenant, the result is a vacancy in a business asset. The landlord's own housing is unaffected. These are not symmetrical harms and we do not treat them as though they were.

The direction of the existing imbalance. Landlords already have credit reporting, employment verification, reference checks, and commercial screening databases. Tenants have had none of it. Renterly narrows a gap; it does not open a new one.

Capacity. A landlord appears on Renterly because of how they conduct a regulated commercial activity. A tenant would appear because of their private housing circumstances. That distinction is the reason our design draws the line where it does.

Attribution cuts both ways. Recording the landlord named on a record is what makes it possible to correct that record when a property changes hands. Without a name there is nothing to correct, and a building's entire history would attach indiscriminately to whoever owns it next. Our correction process is free, and the outcome of it is as often the removal of a landlord's name as the addition of one.

Where we present information drawn from a tribunal or government record, we aim for a fair and accurate report.

• We report outcomes, not allegations. An application that was withdrawn, dismissed or discontinued is shown as such.
• We track amendments. Orders that are amended, reviewed, set aside or overturned on appeal are updated or removed. Our refresh cycle is monthly.
• We cite the source. Every record shows its file number and date so anyone can verify it against the original.
• We do not editorialise. Summaries describe what the record says. We do not characterise landlords based on tribunal history, and we do not compute ratings, scores or rankings from tribunal data.
• We name the landlord identified on each record, as at the date of that record. We do not hold ownership registry data and make no representation about who owns a property today.

Correcting a landlord attribution

If a property has changed hands, or a landlord has been attached to the wrong property, contact [email protected].

We ask for documentation sufficient to establish the change — for example a transfer or deed, a land registry search, an agreement of purchase and sale, a property tax bill, or a signed statement from the current owner. We will tell you if what you have sent is enough, and what else would be.

On a confirmed change we will update the property so the superseded landlord is no longer presented as the most recent landlord for that property. Records dated before the change remain on the page, attributed to the landlord named on them, with their source shown as usual.

This process is free, available to anyone, and unaffected by whether any party has paid us anything. Target response: 5 business days.

If you believe a record on Renterly is inaccurate, out of date, has been superseded, or has been attached to the wrong landlord or ownership period, contact [email protected]. We aim to respond within 5 business days. Corrections to public-record data are made without charge and without conditions.

5.1 We do not screen reviews before publication

Reviews appear as submitted. We apply automated filters for spam and abuse, but we do not read, approve or edit reviews before they go live. Reviews are the views of the individual who wrote them, not of Renterly.

5.2 Reporting a review

Every review carries a Report this review link directly beneath it. Anyone can use it — you do not need an account, and you do not need to be the landlord.

We aim to triage every report within 48 hours. Where a report identifies a specific factual claim as inaccurate, our default is to hide the review pending review.

Our full moderation standards are in the Review Policy.

5.3 Right of reply

Any landlord may reply publicly to any review of their property. Replies appear adjacent to the review with equal prominence.

Replying requires a verified claim, so that a reply genuinely comes from the landlord it purports to come from. An impersonated reply attributed to a real landlord would be worse for that landlord than no reply at all.

Verification involves confirming that a person is the legal owner of a building — corporate registry lookups, land registry searches, identity confirmation, and reconciling names that often differ across sources. We charge a one-time fee to cover that work. There is no recurring charge to reply, and no limit on replies once verified.

This is why tenant document checks are free and landlord verification is not. Confirming that a lease names a particular landlord at a particular address is a short check (section 1.2). Establishing that a person legally owns a building is not.

The fee buys identity verification and nothing else. It has no effect on what appears on Renterly, on ranking, or on how we handle reports and corrections.

Reporting a review and correcting a public record are free for everyone — verified or not, subscriber or not. See sections 4 and 5.2.

These are bright lines, and we state them plainly so we can be held to them.

• We will never accept payment to remove, hide, alter, suppress or demote any review or record. Not as a fee, not as part of an Enhanced listing, not as a negotiated settlement.
• We will never charge for reporting a review or correcting a public record. Both are free to everyone, always.
• We will never sell, license or disclose tenant-identifying information, because we do not hold any.
• We will never operate as a consumer reporting agency or furnish data to credit bureaus.
• We will never supply information for tenant screening decisions. Renterly is organised around properties, not people, and our terms prohibit use of the service to evaluate any individual tenant.
• We will never suppress reviews based on their rating or sentiment, or present our review corpus as complete if it is not.

There is no landlord account type. Anyone may create an account, and what a landlord can do follows from holding a verified claim on a particular property — never from the account itself.

A verified claim, and the optional Enhanced listing attached to one property, together include:

• Claiming and managing that property’s listing, including enhanced details
• Market analytics at neighbourhood and building level, derived from aggregated data
• Response tools and notifications for that property

Neither includes, and neither can be made to include:

• Any information identifying any tenant, current, former or prospective
• Any ability to influence what appears on a listing, or its ranking
• Any screening, vetting or background information about any individual
• Priority in dispute or takedown handling

Accounts with and without a verified claim receive identical treatment in moderation, corrections and right of reply. The one-time verification fee described in section 5.2 of the Terms covers identity checking only; it confers no advantage in how content is handled.

Renterly is subject to the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) and, in British Columbia, the Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA).

If you are an individual landlord named on Renterly, you may:

• Request access to the personal information we hold about you
• Request correction of inaccurate information
• Ask how we obtained it and how it is used

Contact [email protected]. We respond within 30 days.

You may also complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (priv.gc.ca) or, in British Columbia, the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for BC (oipc.bc.ca). We will cooperate fully with either office.

Our legal basis. Where we process personal information appearing in tribunal records without consent, we rely on section 1(d) of the Regulations Specifying Publicly Available Information, which covers information in records of a judicial or quasi-judicial body available to the public, where the collection, use and disclosure relate directly to the purpose for which the information appears. Tribunal orders in landlord and tenant matters are published so that the operation of the rental adjudication system is open to those it affects. Making that record accessible to the tenants it most affects is directly related to that purpose.

Reviews are published with no name attached. We never ask for a contributor's name and do not hold one.

We do hold an email address, and a record of how each contribution was submitted — including the IP address it came from. We are telling you this plainly because it matters: that information could, in combination with records held by others, be used to identify a contributor.

We therefore cannot promise absolute anonymity, and we will not pretend otherwise. A court may order us to disclose what we hold. If we receive such an order, we will:

• Notify the affected user before disclosing anything, unless legally prohibited from doing so
• Disclose only what the order requires
• Publish the number of such orders received in our annual transparency report

We do not disclose user information on request from landlords, their lawyers, or anyone else absent a court order.

We publish an annual report covering: takedown requests received and actioned, correction requests, court orders for user information, and the number of records removed following amendment or appeal.

We will post material changes to this policy at least 30 days before they take effect.

All comments pertaining to this document: [email protected]