Open Estates (“we”, “our”, “us”) operates the openestates.uk website (our “Site”).

Our Site uses cookies to distinguish you from other users. This helps us to provide you with a good experience when you browse our Site and also allows us to improve our Site. By continuing to browse our Site, you are agreeing to our use of cookies.

If you wish to remove cookies placed on your device by our Site or stop our Site placing further cookies on your device you can do this at any time (learn how to do this in the “Turning Cookies Off” section below), however doing so is likely to mean that our Site will not work as you would expect and certain functionality may be lost.

A “cookie” is a piece of information, like a tag, that’s stored on your device when you visit a website. Cookies make web surfing easier for the user by saving user preferences while visiting a website. The only personal information a cookie can contain is information supplied by the user. A cookie cannot read data from a user’s hard drive or read cookie files created by other websites. The use of cookies is an industry standard that can be found on most major websites.

We use information obtained from cookies to tailor our services better to our users’ needs. Many improvements and updates to our Site are based on such data.

We reserve the right to modify or amend the use of cookies at any time and for any reason. Any changes will be posted on our Site and will take effect as soon as they are posted. By continuing to use our Site after any changes are posted you are indicating your acceptance of those changes.

The cookies we use

We use the following cookies:

Strictly necessary cookies: These are cookies that are required for the operation of our Site. They include, for example, cookies that enable you to log into secure areas of our Site.

Analytical/performance cookies: These cookies allow us to recognise and count the number of visitors to our Site and to see how visitors move around our Site when they are using it. This helps us to improve the way our Site works, for example, by ensuring that users are finding what they are looking for easily. We use cookies to compile visitor statistics such as how many people have visited our Site, how they reached our Site, what type of technology they are using (e.g. Mac or Windows which helps to identify when our Site isn’t working as it should for particular technologies), how long they spend on our Site, what page they look at etc. This helps us to continuously improve our Site.

Functionality cookies: These are used to recognise you when you return to our Site. This means that you do not need to log in each time you visit our Site and it enables us to personalise our content for you.

Targeting cookies: These cookies record your visit to our Site or our affiliates’ websites, the pages you have visited and the links you have followed. This information will be used by us and third parties to make our Site and the advertising displayed on it more relevant to your interests. We may also share this information with third parties for this purpose.

You can find more information about the cookies we use and the purposes for which we use them below:

Third-party cookies

Our Site may use third party cookies for a number of reasons, as set out below.

Advertisements displayed on our Site may be delivered via an advertising management service. When you view a web page on our Site that contains advertising provided by one of our advertising management services, the advertising service company may place a cookie on or retrieve a cookie from your computer, if you have enabled cookies.

Please note that third parties may also use cookies, over which we have no control. These cookies are likely to be analytical/performance cookies or targeting cookies. Third parties may place anonymous cookies on the browsers of visitors to their websites and may send their own cookies to the visitors’ cookie file.

Our Site, like most websites, includes functionality provided by third parties. A common example is an embedded video powered by YouTube or Vimeo. Disabling these cookies may mean you cannot access the functions offered by these third parties.

Our third party marketing partners (e.g. Google, Facebook and AdRoll) will use cookies to better target our paid channels.

When you access our Site through social media, or we provide links to social media sites from our Site, you should be aware that the privacy implications vary from social media site to social media site and will be dependent on the privacy settings you have chosen on these sites. Please refer to the social media site’s privacy and cookies policy for more information.

As a consequence of improving the user experience of the Site with third-party tools, third-party cookies from these services may be set while you visit the Site:

• Analytics (Google Analytics)
• Social Networks (e.g. Facebook, Twitter)
• Display Advertising (e.g. Google DoubleClick, FlashTalking, AdNxs, AdRoll)
• A/B Testing (Visual Website Optimiser)

Note that some third party cookies change over time and location, for example, A/B tests and display advertising cookies vary based on the user’s location and other attributes. Third parties may also use cookies to track users across their devices, based on their Google account settings.

Turning Cookies Off

You can usually switch cookies off by adjusting your browser settings to stop it from accepting cookies. The Help function within your browser should tell you how to do this. For more information about how to change your browser settings please see: www.aboutcookies.org and www.youronlinechoices.com. Doing so however is likely to limit the functionality of our Site.