Privacy Policy

1. Introduction

Seoul Homes ("we", "us", or "our") is a property-listing platform that helps people find homes in Seoul and connect with licensed real-estate agents (realtors). Seoul Homes is operated by Expert Sapiens (Business Registration No. 215-03-56446). This Privacy Policy explains what personal information we collect, why we collect it, how long we keep it, who we share it with and where it is processed, and the rights you have. It applies to the Seoul Homes website and related services.

2. Information We Collect

We collect the following, depending on how you use the service:

• Account information — your name, email address, and password, or the profile details provided by Google, Kakao, or Naver if you sign in with them.
• Property inquiries — your name, email, phone number, desired move-in timeline, budget range, preferred contact method, and the message you send when you contact a realtor about a listing.
• Messages with realtors — messages, photos, and files you exchange with a realtor in Seoul Homes chat, and listings you share there.
• Conversations with Zipsa, our AI assistant — the messages you send Zipsa and its replies, whether or not you are signed in. If you are signed in they are linked to your account; if not, they are linked only to a random session identifier.
• Search alerts — your email address and search description when you ask to be notified about new matching listings.
• Voice input — recordings you choose to make in chat, which are converted to text.
• Realtor information — for agents who list properties: business registration number and certificate (verified against the National Tax Service, with automated reading of the uploaded certificate), contact details, profile, and listing content.
• Saved listings and search activity — properties you save and your searches on the site.
• Advertising orders and subscriptions — billing details and payment records when you purchase a paid listing, advertisement, or plan.
• Information collected automatically — log data (IP address, browser type, pages visited), device information, cookies and similar identifiers (see section 7), and error diagnostics, which may include a masked recording of the page session in which an error occurred.

3. How We Use Your Information

We use the information we collect to:

• Operate property listings and deliver your inquiries and messages to the relevant realtor.
• Machine-translate inquiries, messages, and listing text between languages so that you and the realtor can understand each other.
• Provide Zipsa, including searching listings and drafting inquiries that you choose to send.
• Review Zipsa conversations and chats to provide support, improve answers, and detect and investigate spam, fraud, abuse, and reported conversations.
• Verify realtors' business registration and maintain platform trust.
• Process payments for paid advertisements, listings, and plans, and manage those orders.
• Respond to your questions and provide customer support.
• Measure and improve the service through analytics and error monitoring.
• Show advertising that helps keep Seoul Homes free to use (see section 7).
• Comply with legal obligations.

4. Sharing and Outsourced Processing

We do not sell your personal information. When you send an inquiry or message about a listing, it is delivered to the realtor responsible for that listing so they can respond to you. Seoul Homes also receives a copy of each inquiry to support and monitor the service.

We use the following processors to operate the service, who handle data only to provide their service to us:

• Supabase — database, authentication, and file storage.
• Hetzner — application servers.
• Cloudflare — content delivery, security, and basic traffic analytics.
• OpenRouter and the AI model providers it routes to (including Anthropic, DeepSeek, and OpenAI, and cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud) — Zipsa replies, machine translation, and reading realtor registration certificates.
• OpenAI — converting voice recordings to text.
• Resend — transactional and notification emails.
• Toss Payments — payment processing.
• Google — reCAPTCHA spam protection, Google Analytics, and Google sign-in.
• Kakao and Naver — social sign-in; address lookup (Kakao).
• PostHog — product analytics.
• Sentry — error monitoring and session diagnostics.
• Mediavine and its advertising partners — displaying and measuring ads.
• National Tax Service (NTS) — business-registration verification for realtor accounts.

We may also disclose information when required by law, or where we believe in good faith it is necessary to protect the rights, property, or safety of Seoul Homes, our users, or the public.

5. Transfers Outside Korea

Your information is stored and processed outside the Republic of Korea. Transfers happen when you use the relevant feature, over encrypted connections.

Recipient — country — information — purpose — retention:

• Supabase — India (Mumbai) — all account, inquiry, chat, Zipsa, and listing data — storage and hosting — as described in section 6.
• Hetzner — Singapore — data passing through the application — hosting — not stored beyond processing.
• OpenRouter and AI model providers — United States and other countries — Zipsa messages, text sent for translation, and realtor certificates — AI replies, translation, and verification — per each provider's policy; not used by us to train models.
• OpenAI — United States — voice recordings — transcription — per the provider's policy.
• Sentry, PostHog, and Google — United States — device, usage, and error data — monitoring and analytics — per each provider's policy.
• Mediavine and its advertising partners — United States and other countries — cookie and device identifiers and pages viewed — advertising — per each provider's policy.

You can refuse these transfers by not using the relevant feature (for example Zipsa, translation, or voice input) or by blocking optional cookies (section 7); core listing search still works.

6. Retention and Deletion

We retain your personal information until you delete it or close your account, and then delete or anonymize it without undue delay. Specifically:

• Conversations with Zipsa (and, for realtors, the dashboard assistant) are deleted automatically 1 year after the last message, and immediately when you delete your account. Conversations made while signed out are not linked to an account; to have one deleted sooner, contact us with the approximate date and content.
• Chats with realtors are kept while both participants' accounts exist, and are deleted when either participant deletes their account.
• Search alerts are kept until you unsubscribe.
• When you delete your account, you can recover it within 30 days; after that it is deleted permanently.

Exception: where the law requires us to keep certain records, we retain them for the statutory period even after account deletion — for example, records of contracts and withdrawal of subscription, and records of payment and supply of goods, are kept for 5 years, and records of consumer complaints or dispute resolution for 3 years, under the Act on the Consumer Protection in Electronic Commerce. These records are kept with the account link removed.

7. Cookies and Similar Technologies

• Essential — to sign you in, keep your session, remember your cookie choice, and protect forms (Google reCAPTCHA).
• Analytics — Google Analytics and PostHog measure how the site is used; our own analytics (Umami) and Cloudflare count visits without cookies.
• Advertising — Mediavine and its advertising partners use cookies and similar identifiers to show and measure ads, and may share identifiers with other advertising partners. You can manage or opt out of personalised advertising through Mediavine's Privacy Request Center (https://privacy.mediavine.com/) — see Mediavine's privacy policy (https://www.mediavine.com/legal-and-privacy-center/) — or by blocking third-party cookies in your browser. You will still see ads, but they will not be personalised.

Visitors in the EU/EEA, the UK, and Switzerland are asked before analytics cookies are set. Browsers that send a Global Privacy Control signal are opted out of analytics. You can also block or delete cookies in your browser settings; some parts of the service may then not work properly.

8. Your Rights

You may, at any time, request to:

• Access the personal information we hold about you.
• Correct inaccurate information.
• Delete your information or close your account.
• Suspend processing of your information or withdraw consent.

To exercise these rights, contact our privacy officer below. You may also lodge a complaint with the Personal Information Protection Commission (PIPC) or the Korea Internet & Security Agency (KISA, 118).

9. Security

We take reasonable technical and managerial measures to protect your information, including encryption of data in transit, access controls, and restricting staff access to conversations to administrators. No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.

10. Privacy Officer

Privacy Officer: Jiheon Chae (CEO, Expert Sapiens). For any privacy questions or requests, contact us at support@seoulhomes.kr or +82-2-581-0707.

11. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. We publish each version with an effective date, and previous versions remain available from the version selector on this page. For material changes we will provide notice where appropriate.

12. Contact Us

If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, please contact us at support@seoulhomes.kr.