Data Protection Actions For Real Estate Businesses

For a good reason, it’s called ‘big data’—there’s much of it! In 2020, big data reached 64.2 zettabytes. By 2025, it’s expected to exceed 180 zettabytes. That’s a lot of data that needs protecting from cyber thieves.

The real estate industry knows it must do everything possible to give its customers confidence that their data security is at the top of their minds. From privacy regulations like the GDPR to moving away from using third-party data, real estate businesses are adjusting their data capture and use strategies to get the information they need and remain relevant to their customers.

GDPR

If you’re starting a new real estate business, the GDPR is a good place to start your compliance. Consider adhering to the GDPR as a requirement, not a choice.

GDPR, the General Data Protection Regulation, binds the property sector. It came into effect in 2018. GDPR impacts companies based in the EU and anyone with customers in the EU. So, if you live in the US and have EU customers who want to purchase a vacation property in the US, you must ensure you adhere to the GDPR. Let’s take a look at GDPR DPO requirements and core principles.

Core Principles Of GDPR

Some of the chief principles that apply to your business as a consequence of GDPR include the following:

• Being transparent about how you gather, store, and utilize personal data
• Asking your clients for consent on how to use and store data
• Giving your clients access to their data if they request it
• Deleting personal data if your client has asked for it
• Informing clients of any security breaches within 72 hours of discovery

Moreover, you can communicate your business commitment to fairness, transparency, lawfulness, and accountability.

Accountability measures include how you ensure your business is accountable for GDPR compliance. Noncompliance can result in fines.

Data protection on your site must be done by design principles for operations and technology, with your site about GDPR-compliant data protection content and systems.

Expanded definitions for sensitive data and personal data are essential for transparency. Plus, expanded data subject rights, such as forgotten or object-to-object automated data preprocessing, are necessary to remember that any of your business partners are on the hook.

In the Real Estate industry, many third-party providers process data for businesses with citizens in the EU, and GDPR compliance is a must.

Death Of The Third-Party Cookie

Third-party cookies are obsolete!

We’re sure you’re all familiar with cookies now, and we’re not referring to the choc-chip type! We’re referring to the cookies you’re informed about whenever you visit a website nowadays.

Retail agents and other business owners have been using cookies to track website visits and boost user experience for years.

However, Google ad tracking tools and the way we use cookies have dramatically changed. Now, we use only first-party cookies.

Real estate businesses should focus on how they are succeeding with first-party data collection and processing.

First-party cookies establish consent from the offset, and data collectors and websites can create as much data as they want while keeping the person’s digital profile and privacy secure.

Review and Approve Your Policies and Practices

Don’t allow your policy and practices to get out of date. Periodically updating your approach to compliance makes a lot of sense. However, there are also some signs you need to look out for that indicate it’s time to make amendments to your data protection practices, including:

• Compliance is costing you more
• Mistakes are happening more often
• Data capture and analysis are ineffective

Your outdated data management is costing your business money

Outdated data management is one of the most evident reasons to change your data protection practice. Research from Gartner shows that professional workers spend around half their time purely looking for information, which wastes time.

It also costs money to file paper documents. And, if you’re not handling paper but haven’t established effective security methods, your business could be subject to enormous fines if you are the victim of a data breach.

The expense of such a breach is mind-blowing. Not only do you have the cost of getting to the bottom of the issue and rectifying it, but you also have compensation losses and regulatory fines. Furthermore, you’ll need to spend significant money on developing a customer care team for those impacted and a mammoth effort to restore your reputation and rebuild trust.

It makes sense to ensure that your data protection practices are always up to date so your business doesn’t incur unnecessary costs.

You’re noticing an increasing number of mistakes.

Mistakes are more likely to occur if you don’t have a secure, modern, cloud-based document system. These mistakes could manifest into more significant problems, causing some of the scenarios we highlighted in the previous section.

So, if you’ve noticed that human error is creeping in much more than it was, don’t just assume you should criticize employees. Perhaps your data protection methods are no longer serving their purpose.

You feel like you’ve hit a brick wall in your business

Data issues can cause further consequences that are not always as obvious. Examples include:

• Outdated forecasting data and analytics
• Lagging
• Obsolete products and services
• Slower and less effective customer service

Tweak Your System

If you’ve noticed these issues cropping up, it could be because you need efficient and updated data management and protection plans in place.

Make changes if you’ve recently gone paperless.

If you’ve only recently gone paperless, this is a crucial indication that now is the time to make changes.

Consider working with a professional to help you determine whether to keep records digitally or physically, as well as best practices, legal implications, and regulatory obligations.

To cope with handling more of your data online, you need to implement a digital data protection policy and numerous processes

Consider periodic penetration testing to highlight potential issues

Penetration testing is an ethical hacking service. This means that an ethical hacker will breach your system. They do this to locate any weaknesses or vulnerabilities. They’ll provide you with a report that outlines this, with their advice on the steps you need to take to patch up the gap in your data security efforts.

The objective here is that you get the chance to fix any issues before a criminal hacker breaches your network for untoward reasons and causes significant problems for your business.

Many real estate business owners overlook hiring a penetration tester because they feel it wastes their precious cash. However, it would be best to consider that this business service could save your company thousands and millions. Therefore, it’s worth its weight in gold.

It would help if you could find an experienced and reliable penetration tester. After all, this individual will have access to your systems, so you need them to be trusted. Don’t take a risk on someone cheap and unproven.

Change Is Inevitable

You cannot remain stagnant when protecting data.

As you can see, data protection is not an area where we can all afford to remain stagnant. The data landscape is changing constantly, so you need to make relevant changes to keep your data protection efforts up to date.