Privacy policy

Bedford Realty, LLC is a real estate brokerage licensed by the Mississippi Real Estate Commission, operating from 230 Highpoint Drive, Ridgeland, MS 39157. We are the controller of the personal information described in this policy, and collier@bedfordrealty.net is the address for any question or request about it.

This policy covers bedfordrealty.net, the agent and client portals, and the phone and SMS lines we operate. It does not cover third-party sites we link to, including the national commercial marketplaces on our commercial pages and our insurance partner’s own systems — each of those has its own policy and its own controller.

We do not collect anything “just in case”. Each item below is collected for a stated purpose, at a point you can identify.

Browsing and search behaviour

When you search for property we process the search criteria themselves — price band, location, bedrooms, flood-risk filters and so on — to run the query and to size the results. Standard server logs record the request, the time, the referring page, a truncated network address and the browser user-agent string, which we use for security, rate limiting and diagnosing faults.

If you create an account, saved searches and favourites are stored against it, along with which listings a saved-search alert has already told you about, so we do not send you the same property twice.

Enquiries and forms

Contact forms, home-value requests, showing requests and agent applications collect the name, email address, phone number, message, and — for a home-value request — the property address you supply. A property address you type is checked against the US Census Bureau geocoder to confirm it exists and to obtain coordinates; that lookup sends the address string to the Census geocoding service and nothing else.

Every public form carries an invisible field a person never sees, and measures how long the form was open before submission. Both exist solely to reject automated submissions and neither identifies you.

Insurance quote requests

If you use the insurance quote flow, we collect the information an underwriter needs: property address, construction and roof detail, occupancy, claims history you disclose, coverage requested, and your contact details. We also collect photographs you upload — typically of the roof, the exterior elevations and the electrical panel.

That information, including the photographs, is transmitted to Continental Brokers Inc., an independent insurance agency, so that they can obtain quotations for you. Photographs are shared through links that expire rather than as permanent public URLs. Bedford Realty is not an insurance agency, does not underwrite or place insurance, and receives no commission on any policy placed.

Media uploads

Files you upload — photographs, documents, video — are stored encrypted and scanned for malware before they are usable. Photographs frequently contain embedded EXIF metadata including GPS coordinates and device identifiers; that metadata is handled as part of the file and we strip location metadata from images published publicly.

Calls and text messages

Our telephone and messaging services run on Twilio. Calls to and from our office lines may be recorded and transcribed for quality, training and to make sure nothing a client told us gets lost between people. Where a call is recorded you are told at the start of the call; if you would rather not be recorded, say so and we will continue on an unrecorded line or call you back.

Text messages you send us, and those we send you, are stored along with delivery status. If you reply STOP — or any of the standard opt-out words — we record that withdrawal of consent in our own database, permanently, and stop. We keep that record precisely so the opt-out survives any change of provider.

Signing and transactions

If you sign a document through our signing system we record the signature, the signer’s name and email, the time of each action, the network address used and a tamper-evident hash chain of the events. That audit trail is what makes an electronic signature enforceable and it cannot be deleted while the document is legally live.

Analytics and advertising

Where analytics and advertising measurement are configured, page views and a defined set of conversion events — a search performed, an enquiry sent, a quote started — are sent to Google Analytics, Google Ads and Meta. These use cookies and similar identifiers. You can refuse them through your browser or device controls, and a global privacy control signal sent by your browser is honoured where the law requires it.

Every item above rests on one of four bases.

• To do what you asked. Running a search, replying to an enquiry, arranging a showing, obtaining insurance quotations, completing a transaction. Without this information we cannot perform the service.
• Legitimate interests. Security, fraud and bot prevention, service quality, keeping records of what was agreed, and improving the site. We limit this to what a reasonable client would expect.
• Consent. Marketing text messages, marketing email, and analytics or advertising cookies. You can withdraw consent at any time, and withdrawing it does not affect anything done before you did.
• Legal obligation. Mississippi real estate licensing law, anti-money-laundering rules, tax law and the record-keeping obligations that come with a brokerage licence.

We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for anyone else’s marketing. It is shared only in these circumstances:

• Continental Brokers Inc. — insurance quote information and uploaded photographs, when you ask for a quotation.
• The MLS and other brokerages — where necessary to market a property you have listed with us, or to transact on one you are buying.
• Service providers acting on our instructions — hosting, database, object storage, email delivery, Twilio for voice and SMS, e-signature providers where used, payment processing, and analytics where configured. Each is bound to use the data only to provide that service.
• Professionals in your transaction — closing attorneys, title companies, lenders, inspectors and appraisers, where you have asked us to work with them.
• Regulators and law enforcement — including the Mississippi Real Estate Commission, where we are legally required to produce records.

Different records have genuinely different lifespans, and a single “we keep it as long as necessary” sentence would tell you nothing.

• Enquiries that go nowhere — deleted on request at any time, and reviewed periodically for deletion where there has been no contact for two years.
• Transaction files — retained for the period Mississippi brokerage record-keeping rules require, and for as long as a claim arising from the transaction could be brought.
• Signed documents and their audit trail — retained for the life of the agreement and the limitation period that follows. These cannot be selectively deleted without destroying the evidential value of the signature.
• Insurance quote records and photographs — retained while the quotation is live and for a limited period afterwards for the underwriting record. You may ask us to delete uploaded photographs sooner and we will, unless a policy has been placed in reliance on them.
• Call recordings and transcripts — retained for a limited period for quality and dispute resolution, then deleted.
• SMS opt-out records — retained indefinitely, deliberately. Deleting an opt-out record is how somebody ends up being texted again after asking us to stop.
• Security and audit logs — retained for a limited period appropriate to detecting and investigating misuse.

You can, at any time:

• Ask for a copy of the personal information we hold about you.
• Ask us to correct anything that is wrong.
• Ask us to delete your information. We will do so except where we are required to keep it — an executed contract, a signature audit trail, a licensing or tax record, or an SMS opt-out. Where we cannot delete something we will tell you exactly what and exactly why.
• Stop marketing. Reply STOP to any text, use the unsubscribe link in any marketing email, or tell any agent. Transactional messages about a live transaction are not marketing and continue.
• Object to call recording — say so at the start of the call.
• Refuse analytics and advertising cookies through your browser or device settings.

To make any of these requests, email collier@bedfordrealty.net with “Privacy request” in the subject line, or call 601-707-6535. We will acknowledge within five business days and respond substantively within thirty days. We may need to verify who you are before acting — usually by confirming details you have already given us — because handing somebody else’s file to the wrong person is the worst possible outcome of a privacy request.

Residents of states with comprehensive privacy statutes may have additional rights, including the right to appeal a refusal. If we refuse a request we will tell you how to appeal it.

Transport is encrypted. Passwords are hashed with a memory-hard algorithm and are never recoverable, by us or by anyone else. Staff accounts with access to client data require multi-factor authentication. Uploaded files are stored encrypted, scanned for malware, and served through links that expire rather than as permanent public URLs.

Access to client records is logged. Security-relevant actions — logins, exports, document access, quote transmissions — are written to an append-only audit trail.

No system is perfect, and a policy that claimed otherwise would be worth nothing. If we discover a breach affecting your personal information we will notify you and the relevant authorities as the law requires, and we will tell you what actually happened rather than a sanitised version of it.

This site is intended for adults. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 16. If you believe a child has given us information, write to collier@bedfordrealty.net and we will delete it.

When this policy changes we update the effective date at the top. Where a change materially affects how we use information you have already given us, we will tell you directly rather than relying on you re-reading this page.

Related: our terms of use, accessibility statement and copyright policy.