Privacy Policy

Latchel, Inc. (“Latchel”, “we”, “us” or “our”) provides maintenance coordination, current and prospective resident and owner experience and related software and services to property management companies, and provides services directly to residents and maintenance service providers. This policy explains what personal information we collect, why we collect it, who we share it with, and what you can do about it.

1. Who this policy covers

Who is responsible for your information follows one rule. If you deal with Latchel directly, by buying from us, creating an account with us, or visiting this website, we are the business (or, under some state laws, the controller) for that information. If your information reaches us through a business customer we serve, such as your property manager, that customer is the business and we are a service provider: we handle it on their instruction, not for our own purposes. The most common situations:

Property managers and their users

Property management companies that buy our services, and the individual people they authorize to use them. For this information we are the business.

Residents

People who live in a property managed by one of our property manager customers. Most information about residents reaches us from the property manager, or from residents using our service on the property manager’s behalf. For that information the property manager is the business and we are a service provider. We are the business only where a resident buys something from Latchel directly and pays us for it, such as a resident benefits package bought directly from us. A benefits package your property manager provides is not that, even though you pay for it: your property manager enrolls you, sets the fee and collects it through your lease or their own billing, so for that information the property manager is the business and we remain a service provider.

Property owners

Owners of the properties our property manager customers manage. They are their property manager’s clients, and their information reaches us from the property manager or through the property manager’s account. For that information the property manager is the business and we are a service provider.

Service providers and contractors

Vendors and technicians who perform maintenance work. For those who join the Latchel Vendor Network or Latchel Contractor Network by signing up with us directly, we are the business. For a property manager’s own in-house or preferred vendors, whose details the property manager enters, the property manager is the business and we are a service provider.

People who book services through Latchel Contractor Dispatch

You deal with us directly, so we are the business for this information.

Website visitors

Anyone who visits latchel.com. We are the business for this information.

These are illustrations, not an exhaustive list: the rule above decides any situation not named here.

2. What this policy covers

This policy covers the latchel.com website, our maintenance and resident experience platform, the property manager, resident, owner and service provider portals, our mobile and messaging channels, and our AI front office, which answers and handles calls and messages to a property manager’s office, whether or not they are about maintenance. It also covers any other Latchel product, feature or channel that links to this policy, including ones we introduce after the date at the top of this page. We refer to all of these together as the “Service”.

It does not cover a property manager’s own website, portal, or privacy practices, or those of any other third party. It also does not replace an agreement we have signed with a property manager; where a signed agreement addresses the same subject, that agreement governs between us and that property manager.

3. Information we collect

We collect the following categories of personal information. Not every category applies to every person, and the items named under each category are examples of what it covers rather than a closed list.

• Identifiers — name, postal address, email address, phone number, account username, and online identifiers including IP address and cookie identifiers.
• Property and tenancy information — the unit or property you occupy or manage, unit access instructions, entry permissions, pet and occupancy details a property manager provides, and lease-related details relevant to maintenance responsibility.
• Maintenance information — the substance of maintenance requests, troubleshooting exchanges, appointment times and availability, photographs and video you submit of a problem in a unit, work order history, service notes, invoices and estimates.
• Communications — the content and metadata of calls, text messages, emails, chat and in-app messages exchanged with us or through our platform, including call recordings and transcripts. See section 7.
• Commercial and payment information — services purchased, resident benefits enrollment, billing records, and payment-method details, which are collected and stored by our payment processor rather than by us. See section 12.
• Internet and device activity — pages viewed, links and buttons clicked, referring page, session duration, browser and operating system, device type, approximate location derived from IP address, and the analytics and measurement described in section 9.
• Service provider information — trade, licensing and insurance details, service areas, rates, availability and work history.
• Professional information — job title, employer and role, for property manager users and for people who contact us about our services.
• Inferences — conclusions drawn from the above, such as the likely category or urgency of a maintenance issue.

We do not ask for, and ask that you do not send us, government identification numbers, financial account numbers, health information, biometric identifiers, precise geolocation, or information about race, religion, union membership, immigration status, sexual orientation or any other sensitive category. If you send us information of this kind anyway — for example by describing a medical condition when explaining why a repair is urgent — we will handle it under this policy and delete it when it is no longer needed for the request.

4. Where it comes from

Information reaches us from the sources below, and the situations named under each are examples.

• From you, when you submit a maintenance request, create an account, call or text us, fill in a form, or enroll in a resident benefits package with us directly.
• From your property manager, who supplies resident, owner, property, vendor and staff information so that we can perform the services they have engaged us for.
• From service providers, who report on work performed, submit invoices and estimates, and update job status.
• Automatically, from your device and browser when you use the Service, as described in section 9.
• From our vendors, such as our payment processor confirming that a payment succeeded.

5. How we use it

We use personal information for the purposes below. The activities named under each purpose are examples of what it involves, not a closed list.

• To provide the Service, including intake and triage of maintenance requests, troubleshooting problems, dispatching and scheduling service providers, confirming completion, and processing invoices and payments.
• To communicate with you, for example about a request, an appointment, an account or a payment.
• To provide customer support and to investigate and resolve complaints, disputes and refund requests.
• To operate, maintain, secure, monitor and troubleshoot the Service.
• To detect, investigate and prevent fraud, abuse, security incidents and activity that is illegal or violates our terms.
• To analyze how the Service is used and to improve it, including as described in section 6.
• To market our services to property management companies, and to send you material you have asked for. This includes using material submitted through the Service, such as descriptions and messages but not photographs or video, in our marketing, on the terms of the licence in Terms of Use, section 26. Where material belongs to a property manager we serve, we use it in marketing only in de-identified form or with that property manager’s permission. You can opt out of marketing at any time.
• To comply with law, respond to lawful requests, and establish, exercise or defend legal claims.

6. Service improvement and model training

We use information generated through the Service to make the Service better. Concretely, that includes developing, training, testing, tuning, evaluating and improving the models, algorithms and machine learning systems that power features such as maintenance triage, troubleshooting guidance, scheduling and our AI front office.

Four commitments govern how we do this.

• We do not acquire ownership of your information by using it. Nothing in this policy transfers ownership of anyone’s information to us.
• Information is de-identified or aggregated before it is used to develop or train models. De-identification may be carried out by us or by a vendor acting on our behalf under contract. De-identified data is information that can no longer reasonably be used to infer information about, be linked to, or identify a particular person or household. We take reasonable measures to prevent re-identification, and we commit publicly to keeping such data de-identified and not to attempt to re-identify it, except to test that our de-identification works. We contractually require anyone who receives it not to attempt to re-identify it, and not to create a voiceprint or other biometric identifier or attempt to identify any person from it. We may share, license and otherwise commercialize de-identified and aggregated data — for example industry benchmarks, maintenance cost baselines, and training and evaluation datasets. Because de-identified data is no longer personal information, our obligations to delete or return personal information do not extend to it.
• Identifiable information is never used to improve the service for anyone else. We do not use one property manager’s information in identifiable form to develop, train or improve a model, feature or service offered to another customer.
• We do not sell personal information, and we do not permit any vendor that processes information on our behalf to use personal information we provide for its own purposes, including to develop or train its own models.

Voice recordings and transcripts are used to improve accuracy, safety and quality, including for the AI front office. We do not create voiceprints or other biometric identifiers, and we do not use voice data to identify a speaker biometrically.

If you are a resident or a property manager’s vendor, the property manager may have agreed to terms with us that place additional limits on these uses. Where they have, those limits apply to your information.

7. Calls, recordings and text messages

We may also connect residents and service providers using a masked phone number, so that neither party has to disclose their own. When we do, we and our telephony vendor receive and store the date, time, phone numbers and content of the messages exchanged.

Text messages. We send text messages from a range of numbers, which may include ten-digit local numbers, toll-free numbers and short codes. Message frequency varies, and message and data rates may apply.

• Automated and bulk messages — reply STOP to any of them and we suppress you across every number we send automated messages from for that messaging program, not only the one that messaged you. Reply START to resume, or HELP for help.
• Individual messages sent by a person, such as a coordinator working on your request, are opted out per number: reply STOP to that number.
• You can opt out of all of it at any time by emailing privacy@latchel.com.

Opting out of service-related messages may affect our ability to coordinate maintenance for you. Consent to marketing messages is never a condition of receiving maintenance service.

8. AI and automated processing

Parts of the Service are automated. Our AI front office answers calls to a property manager’s office. On a maintenance call it asks about the problem, offers troubleshooting steps and gathers the information needed to open or update a work order. On other calls it answers questions or takes the details needed to route the call to the right place. Automated systems also assist with work such as categorizing requests, estimating urgency and suggesting scheduling.

To handle your request, our AI may read your information in identifiable form at that moment, such as your open work orders and maintenance history. That is not training: models are trained only on de-identified or aggregated data, as section 6 describes.

These systems support decisions about maintenance coordination. They do not make decisions about housing, tenancy, credit, employment or insurance, and we do not use them for profiling that produces legal or similarly significant effects. Budget limits, approval rules and dispatch rules are configured by your property manager, not by us.

9. Tracking technologies

We and our vendors use cookies, tags, pixels, SDKs and similar technologies. They fall into the categories below.

• Strictly necessary — what makes the site work: delivering pages, security, and remembering choices such as your tracking opt-out on this browser.
• Analytics and measurement — how visitors find and move through our website and our software: page views, clicks, scrolling, mouse movement and navigation, so that we can see what is working, find where our software is confusing, and diagnose problems people report. Some of this records what happens on the screen during a visit. That part follows the opt-out in section 10; plain measurement does not.
• Advertising and attribution — measuring which advertising leads to a demo request, and building audiences for advertising on third-party platforms. Under California law some of this counts as “sharing” for cross-context behavioral advertising. See section 18.
• Forms and customer records — the forms on our site and the customer records behind them. A form sets a cookie when it loads.
• Referral attribution — a first-party cookie that records the referral code in the link you arrived through, so that we can attribute a signup. It expires after one year.

These technologies may collect page views, navigation, clicks, device and browser details, IP address, approximate location derived from IP address, and referring page, and may transmit that information to the vendors that provide them.

Consent through use. By using our marketing website or the Latchel application you consent to the technologies described above and to the collection and processing described in this policy, subject to the controls in section 10.

10. Global Privacy Control and Do Not Track

We do honor Global Privacy Control. Global Privacy Control (GPC) is a signal your browser or a browser extension can send on your behalf. When we receive it we treat it as a request to opt out of the sale and sharing of your personal information, and for that visit we do not load advertising or attribution technologies on our marketing website and do not record your session. We do the same if you have opted out at Your Privacy Choices, and for visitors who appear to be in the European Union or the United Kingdom.

We do not respond to Do Not Track signals. No common standard for interpreting them was ever adopted, so a Do Not Track header does not change what we do. California law requires us to disclose how we treat these signals, so we say so plainly. Global Privacy Control is the signal that works.

This reaches our marketing website, not the Latchel application. The application, at app.latchel.com and our other Latchel subdomains, uses technologies of the kind described in section 9 as part of how the software works. They are not advertising, and they are not a sale or sharing of your personal information, so an opt-out here or a GPC signal does not reach them. Your use of the application is covered by this policy and by the agreement that applies to you.

You can also limit tracking through your browser’s own cookie controls, and through the industry opt-out pages at optout.aboutads.info and optout.networkadvertising.org, and through the ad settings each advertising platform publishes. Limiting optional tracking does not affect your ability to use the Service.

11. How we share information

• With your property manager, who is our customer and, for most resident, vendor, owner and other personal information, the party responsible for it.
• With service providers assigned to a job, who receive what they need to reach you and complete the work — typically name, address, contact details, unit access instructions and the description of the problem. They may use it only for that job. Our terms forbid them to market their own services to you, to add you to a mailing, texting or calling list, or to pass your information on: see Terms of Use, section 8.c.
• With our vendors, who process information on our behalf under contract and may not use personal information for their own purposes — including to develop or train their own models. These include vendors for cloud hosting, telephony and messaging, payment processing, customer support tooling, and data processing and de-identification.
• With advertising and analytics partners, as described in section 9. Under California law, some of this counts as “sharing” for cross-context behavioral advertising even though no money changes hands. See section 18.
• De-identified and aggregated data, as described in section 6.
• For legal reasons — to comply with law or legal process, to enforce our agreements, and to protect the rights, property or safety of Latchel, our customers or the public.
• In a corporate transaction — if Latchel is involved in a merger, acquisition, financing or sale of assets, information may transfer as part of that transaction, subject to this policy.

We do not sell personal information for money.

12. Payments

Payments are processed by Stripe, Inc. Payments out to residents in connection with resident benefits are disbursed through Ramp Business Corporation. Card and bank account details are collected and stored by those processors, not by us; we receive confirmation that a payment succeeded and the limited details needed for billing and support. Their handling of your information is governed by their own terms and privacy policies.

13. How long we keep it

How long we keep personal information depends on what it is and why we hold it. We keep it for as long as it serves the purposes described in this policy, and we work out how long that is from the criteria below rather than from a single fixed period:

• whether we still need it to provide the Service, including the history that makes a property, a unit, an account or a maintenance issue intelligible over time;
• whether a property manager’s agreement with us requires us to hold it, return it or delete it;
• what legal, tax, accounting, insurance and audit obligations apply to it;
• whether it may be needed to resolve or anticipate a dispute, claim, investigation or legal hold; and
• whether it is needed for security, fraud prevention, safety or service quality.

In practice, maintenance and work order history, call recordings and transcripts, account and billing records and support correspondence are generally kept through the relationship and for a period afterwards, for as long as those criteria apply. Where a property manager’s agreement with us addresses the return or deletion of information we hold on their behalf, that agreement governs what we do with it and when. Marketing website analytics are bounded by the retention settings of the tools described in section 9.

You can ask us to delete personal information, and we will honor that where the law requires it and where we are the party able to act on it: see section 14 and section 15. Backups are overwritten on their own cycle, so information may persist in a backup for a period after it is deleted from our live systems. De-identified and aggregated data is not personal information and none of this applies to it.

14. Your privacy rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to:

• Know and access the personal information we hold about you, the categories we collect, the purposes we collect it for, and who we disclose it to.
• Correct inaccurate personal information.
• Delete personal information, subject to exceptions in the law.
• Obtain a portable copy of information you provided to us.
• Opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information, of targeted advertising, and of certain profiling.
• Appeal a decision we make on your request, if your state provides that right.
• Not be discriminated against for exercising any of these rights. We will not deny you service, charge you a different price, or give you a lower quality of service because you made a request.

15. Making a request

You can make a request in either of two ways:

• By following the steps at Your Privacy Choices, which walks you through what to include and where your request goes.
• By emailing privacy@latchel.com.

Where your request goes. It depends on where the information came from, not on who you are.

• If your request concerns information your property manager gave us or generated through their account — which covers most information about residents, property owners, a property manager’s own vendors and a property manager’s staff — the property manager is the business responsible for it and we handle it on their instruction. We will identify the property manager where we can, forward your request to them, and tell you that we have done so. Because the information is theirs, the property manager is the one who can decide the request, and we act on their instruction to carry it out.
• If your request concerns information we collected directly — for example a resident benefits package you bought directly from Latchel and pay us directly for, a Contractor Dispatch booking, a vendor account you created with us, a property manager account, a form you submitted, or your use of latchel.com — we handle it ourselves.

Verification. We will ask you for enough information to confirm that you are who you say you are, in proportion to the sensitivity of what you are asking for. We cannot act on a request we cannot verify. An authorized agent may make a request on your behalf if they provide proof that you authorized them.

Timing. We acknowledge requests within 10 business days and respond within 45 calendar days. If we need more time we will tell you why within that period and may take up to 90 days in total.

Appeals. If we decline your request and your state gives you a right to appeal, reply to our response or write to privacy@latchel.com with the word “Appeal” in the subject line. We will respond within 45 days with our decision and the reasons for it, and tell you how to contact your state attorney general if you disagree.

16. Substantiating a data-handling claim

If you believe your information has been collected, used, shared or processed in violation of this policy or of the law, please tell us and give us enough to investigate it. Along with the notice described in the Terms of Use, please provide:

1. a complete, unedited copy of the data that forms the basis of your claim, to the extent it is in your possession or control;
2. a written explanation of what you say happened, including the dates it occurred, the URLs you accessed, the device and browser you used, and the IP addresses you used if you know them;
3. the legal basis or theory your claim rests on; and
4. a description of the harm you say you suffered.

We ask for this so that we can actually investigate what happened. It is not a limit on any right you have under the law.

17. Disputes about data handling

Any dispute, claim or controversy about the collection, use, sharing, processing or retention of information under this policy is governed by the dispute resolution provisions of our Terms of Use — including the notice requirements, the informal resolution period, the arbitration agreement, the class action waiver, and the governing law and venue set out there. By using the Service you agree that any such dispute proceeds in that way and not as a class, collective, consolidated or representative action.

If another agreement between you and Latchel, such as the Master Services Agreement, the Resident Benefits Agreement or the Contractor Dispatch Terms, provides its own dispute resolution or governing law terms, those control for disputes within that agreement’s scope.

18. California

This section supplements the rest of this policy for California residents.

Categories collected and disclosed. In the preceding 12 months we collected the categories listed in section 3, which correspond to these CCPA categories: identifiers; customer records information; commercial information; internet or other electronic network activity information; professional or employment-related information; audio and electronic information; and inferences. We disclosed each of these categories for a business purpose to the recipients described in section 11.

Sale and sharing. We do not sell personal information for money. We do share identifiers and internet activity information with advertising and attribution partners, as described in section 9, for cross-context behavioral advertising, which counts as “sharing” under the CCPA.

How to opt out. We process opt-out preference signals, including Global Privacy Control, as a global opt-out of sale and sharing for the browser that sends them, in the manner California’s regulations describe. You can also opt out at Your Privacy Choices, which is where that control lives. Because we honor opt-out preference signals for every consumer, we offer the choice there rather than through a separate “Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information” link.

Platform privacy settings. Where an advertising platform offers a setting that limits how it uses data about California residents, such as Meta’s Limited Data Use and Google’s Restricted Data Processing, we enable it for all traffic, not only on request.

Sensitive personal information. We do not collect sensitive personal information for the purpose of inferring characteristics. Where we relay messages between residents and service providers, their content passes through and is stored on our systems, as section 7 describes, and we use it only to provide the Service and for safety and dispute resolution. We do not use or disclose sensitive personal information beyond the purposes California permits without an option to limit, so there is nothing for a “Limit the Use of My Sensitive Personal Information” link to switch off.

Retention. See section 13.

Shine the Light. We do not disclose personal information to third parties for their own direct marketing purposes. We do give the service provider assigned to your job the contact details they need to reach you and complete the work, and our terms do not permit them to use those details to market their own services to you, or to disclose them to anyone else.

Complaints. If a complaint is not resolved to your satisfaction you may contact the Complaint Assistance Unit of the Division of Consumer Services of the California Department of Consumer Affairs, 1625 North Market Blvd., Suite N 112, Sacramento, California 95834, or by telephone at (800) 952-5210 or (916) 445-1254.

19. Other US states

If you live in a state with a comprehensive privacy law — including Virginia, Colorado, Connecticut, Utah, Texas, Oregon, Montana, Delaware, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Nebraska, Iowa, Indiana, Tennessee, Minnesota, Maryland, Rhode Island or Kentucky — you have the rights described in section 14, exercisable as described in section 15, including the right to appeal.

We honor universal opt-out mechanisms, including Global Privacy Control, in every state, whether or not that state requires it. You can opt out of targeted advertising as described in section 10 and section 15. We do not sell personal information for money. Where your state’s law defines a sale to include an exchange for other valuable consideration, the advertising and attribution technologies described in section 9 may be a sale, and you may opt out as section 10 and section 15 describe. We do not engage in profiling in furtherance of decisions that produce legal or similarly significant effects concerning a consumer.

20. Visitors outside the United States

Latchel is a United States company and the Service is operated in and intended for the United States. If you access it from elsewhere, your information is transferred to and processed in the United States, where privacy law differs from the law where you live.

For visitors to our marketing website who appear to be in the European Union or the United Kingdom we do not load advertising or attribution technologies at all, we do not record sessions, and site measurement runs in a cookieless mode. We do not offer the Service to consumers in the European Union or the United Kingdom, and this policy is not written to satisfy the GDPR or the UK GDPR. If you are in either place and believe we hold information about you, write to privacy@latchel.com.

21. Security

We maintain administrative, technical and physical safeguards appropriate to the nature of the information we hold, including encryption in transit, access controls, logging and vendor review. No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.

If we confirm a security incident affecting your personal information we will notify you, or the property manager responsible for it, as the law requires and without unreasonable delay.

You are responsible for keeping your account credentials confidential. If you believe your account has been compromised, contact us immediately.

22. Age

The Service is for people aged 18 and over. Except as the next paragraph describes, we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18, and if we learn that we have, we delete it. If you believe a person under 18 has given us personal information, contact privacy@latchel.com and we will remove it.

We recognize that a household may include minors and that a minor may occasionally call about a maintenance problem. We do not create accounts for them, we limit what we retain from such a contact to what the maintenance request requires, and we do not use it for marketing.

23. Third-party sites

The Service may link to sites we do not operate. We do not control them and are not responsible for their content or their privacy practices. Read the privacy policy of any site you visit.

Our use and transfer of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

24. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy. When we do, we change the version number and effective date at the top of the page.

A new version applies from its effective date. If we make a material change to how we handle information we have already collected, we will tell you before that change applies to it, by posting a notice on this site, by email, or both.

Changes that clarify wording, correct an error or add detail without changing what we do take effect when posted.

25. Contact us

For privacy questions or to make a request:

Latchel, Inc.
Attn: Privacy
1111B S Governors Ave, STE 6677
Dover, DE 19904
United States
privacy@latchel.com

For legal notices, see the Terms of Use.