Acceptable Use Policy

1. What this covers

This policy applies to everybody using propalot.co.za, signed in or not, and forms part of the Terms of Service. Breaching it is breaching those terms.

It is short on purpose. A marketplace that publishes forty pages of prohibited conduct is one that expects to argue about the edges. These are the things that actually matter, with the reason attached, because a rule whose reason is obvious is one people follow.

2. What may be published

Real property, in South Africa, that you own or hold a written mandate to market, advertised at a price you would genuinely accept, illustrated with photographs of that property.

That is the whole permitted set. Everything in section 3 is a consequence of it.

3. What may not be published

• Property you have no right to market. No mandate, no listing. This is the single fastest way to lose an account.
• Duplicates. One property, one listing. Publishing the same home four times to occupy more of a results page takes space from sellers who did not.
• Photographs of a different property, stock images presented as the actual home, renders passed off as photographs, or images edited to remove a defect. A photograph must show the property as it stands.
• Photographs you do not hold the rights in, including a previous agent's.
• Discriminatory conditions. No listing may exclude or prefer on race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, disability, pregnancy, marital status, age, language, belief or culture. This is section 9 of the Constitution and the Rental Housing Act, not a house preference.
• Contact details in the description or the photographs. Every listing carries the seller's details in the place buyers look for them, and burying a number in an image defeats the enquiry record that protects both sides.
• Anything unlawful, defamatory, obscene, or in breach of somebody else's intellectual property.
• Malware, links to it, or phishing of any kind.

4. Bait pricing and phantom stock

A property advertised well below the price the seller would accept, in order to generate enquiries for something else, is bait advertising. It is prohibited here and it is prohibited by section 30 of the Consumer Protection Act 68 of 2008.

The same goes for leaving a sold or let property up to keep drawing leads. Mark it sold, which Propalot makes a single click, and it keeps working for you as evidence of a sale rather than as a misrepresentation.

The price fairness model reads every listing against the suburb benchmark, so a figure far outside the range is visible to us and to every buyer looking at it.

5. How users treat each other

Buyers, sellers and practitioners are all somebody. Do not harass, threaten, defame or abuse another user, and do not use an enquiry to deliver any of that.

Do not impersonate somebody else, a business, or a Propalot member of staff. Do not create an account to evade a suspension on another one.

Where a property practitioner is involved, the Property Practitioners Act 22 of 2019 and the code of conduct of the Property Practitioners Regulatory Authority apply to them in full. Nothing here reduces that, and a serious breach may be reported to the Authority as well as dealt with here.

6. Enquiry data

An enquiry contains somebody's name, email address and telephone number, given for one purpose: to answer a question about one property.

Use it for that. Do not add the sender to a mailing list, do not load them into a CRM for unrelated marketing, do not pass them to another agent, and do not sell them. Doing any of that breaches this policy and, separately, breaches POPIA, for which the sender can complain about you directly to the Information Regulator.

Harvesting contact details from the platform by any means, whether by hand or by script, is prohibited outright.

7. Scraping, automation and rate limits

Propalot is free to read and we would like it to stay that way, so the limits are worth stating rather than enforcing silently.

• Do not scrape. No bulk automated extraction of listings, prices, photographs, agents or intelligence data, whether for a competing product, a dataset, or a model.
• Do not automate against the site. No scripted account creation, scripted enquiries, or automated form submission.
• Respect the rate limits. They protect the site for everybody. Circumventing them by rotating addresses or accounts is a breach in itself.
• Do not overload it. No denial of service, no deliberate resource exhaustion.
• Do not reverse engineer the platform, or try to extract the models behind the intelligence panels.

If you want the data, ask. A conversation is quicker than a scraper.

8. Security testing

We welcome people who find weaknesses and we would rather hear from you than not.

Test only against your own account and your own data. Do not access, modify or exfiltrate anybody else's information. Do not run destructive tests, do not degrade the service for other users, and do not publish a finding before we have had a reasonable chance to fix it.

Report to privacy@propalot.co.za. Research conducted within those bounds is welcome, and we will not pursue anybody who stays inside them.

9. Reporting something

Every listing has a way to report it. Use it, or write to hello@propalot.co.za with the URL and what is wrong.

Reports of fraud, of a property listed without a mandate, or of anything endangering somebody are looked at the same day. Everything else within two working days. We will tell you what we did.

10. What we do about a breach

Proportionately, and in this order where the facts allow it:

1. We tell you, explain what is wrong, and give you a chance to fix it. Most breaches are a misunderstanding and end here.
2. We remove the content that breaches the policy, and say so.
3. We suspend the account where it is repeated or serious.
4. We close it where it is deliberate, fraudulent, or endangers somebody.

Where a buyer or seller is actively being defrauded we skip straight to the end and explain afterwards. That is the one case where notice first would be the wrong thing to do.

Where the conduct is criminal, we report it, and we cooperate with the police and with the Property Practitioners Regulatory Authority.

Section 11 of the Terms of Service covers what closure means for a paid plan, and Pricing, Refunds and Cancellation covers the money.

11. Reaching us

hello@propalot.co.za · +27 10 001 0001
Propalot (Pty) Ltd, 12 Fredman Drive, Sandton, 2196, South Africa

If you think we have got an enforcement decision wrong, say so at that address. A person will look at it again.