Privacy Notice

CouC is operated by Stephan Oosthuizen, trading as CouC, a sole proprietor in South Africa. Address for service: Unit 220, The Vineyards, Nooitgedacht Village, Koelpark, Stellenbosch, South Africa. Email: stephan@couc.co.za.

Stephan Oosthuizen is CouC's Information Officer, as required by section 55 of the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA). For any question about your information, or to ask what we hold about you, email the address above.

Your details

Your name, email address and phone number; whether you are a Seller, a Property Practitioner or a Conveyancer; and your agency or firm name and branch where that applies.

Details you give us about other people

The registered owners of the property (the sellers), the purchasers, the person who will give access to the property, and the conveyancing firm and secretary. For each of these: names, phone numbers and email addresses; and where a seller or purchaser is a company, closed corporation or trust, the entity name, its registration number and the representative's name.

The property

The street address, suburb, unit and complex, erf number and building size, plus anything you tell us in the comments field.

We collect this information for one purpose: so the contractor you choose can contact you, attend the property, carry out the inspection and issue the certificate, and so the certificate reaches the conveyancer who needs it to lodge the transfer.

For the sellers, purchasers and other people named on a request who never use the site themselves, our legal basis for processing their details is that doing so is a necessary step in performing the property sale they are already a party to (a compliance certificate is a standard requirement of that transaction), and it is in the legitimate interests of the submitter and CouC in facilitating it. We keep what we collect about them to the minimum needed for that purpose.

We do not use any of it for marketing. We do not sell it, and we do not share it with anyone beyond the people listed below.

The contractor you choose on the form; the CouC administrator; and the conveyancer named on the form, once a certificate has been issued.

You choose one contractor for a request, and only that contractor receives your details. We only offer you contractors who are registered for every certificate you have asked for, so nobody is sent a request for work they may not lawfully do.

CouC never handles the money for the inspection work. You pay the contractor directly, so we never see your banking or card details for it.

By submitting the form you confirm that you may share those details for this purpose, and that you will tell the people concerned that their details were given to CouC and to the contractor chosen, for the compliance certificate.

Anyone whose details appear on a request - including a seller, purchaser or access person who never visits our site - can email stephan@couc.co.za at any time to ask what we hold about them, to correct it, or to ask for it to be deleted. We may also send a short notice directly to the email addresses given for these people when a request is submitted, telling them the same thing.

Both forms have a "Can't find your town?" link. If you use it we keep the town and province you named, the certificates you said you needed, and - if you gave them - your name, email address and phone number.

We use it for one thing: to decide which towns to add, and to tell you once yours is on the form. We do not use it for marketing and we do not share it with a contractor. We keep it for one year, then delete it.

Everything above is about people who request an inspection. If you apply on our registration page, we also collect information about you and your business.

What we collect from you

Your business name and company registration number; the contact person's name, phone number and the email address booking requests should go to; the province and towns you cover; and, for each certificate type you offer, your registration number, its expiry date and a copy of the registration certificate itself.

Proof that the business exists

We also ask for one document proving the business is real: a CIPC registration document for a company or closed corporation, or - if you trade as a sole proprietor - a copy of your ID document.

An ID copy is sensitive personal information, so we handle it with extra care and for the shortest time we reasonably can:

• It is used only to check that the business applying is yours.
• It is stored in private storage that no public link reaches, and only the CouC administrator can open it, through a link that expires within a minute. It is never shown to customers, never included in any email, and never given to anyone else.
• Once we have checked it against your application, we delete the ID image itself. We keep only a short verification record - the document type, the ID number, and the date it was checked - for as long as you are listed and for 5 years afterwards, so we can show why a listing was approved if that is ever questioned. We do not keep the document image for that whole period.
• If your application is rejected, we delete the ID image immediately and keep the application record for one year, then delete it too.

You can ask us at any time what we hold about you, or ask for it to be corrected - email the address above.

In a Supabase database hosted in Ireland (region eu-west-1). This means your information is transferred outside South Africa. We rely on section 72(1)(a) of POPIA for this: Ireland is part of the European Union, and EU data protection law (the GDPR) provides a level of protection for personal information that is substantially similar to POPIA's. That is the legal basis for storing your information there.

• Request records (a compliance certificate request and everyone named on it): kept for 5 years after the certificate is issued, then deleted. We use 5 years because a property transfer can need to be reconstructed years later, and it comfortably covers the ordinary 3-year prescription period for most legal claims. Records for requests that never proceed are deleted on the same timetable.
• Approved contractor listings: business and registration details are kept while you are listed and for 5 years after we take your listing down, then deleted. ID document images are deleted after verification (see above) - only a short verification record is kept for that period.
• Rejected contractor applications: kept for 1 year, then deleted. ID document images are deleted immediately on rejection.
• Applications we have not decided: if we have not reviewed an application within 90 days we delete the ID document image, and we delete the application record one year after you sent it.
• Missing-town reports: kept for 1 year from the day you sent it, or from the day we added the town, then deleted.

We take appropriate technical and organisational measures to keep your information secure, including access controls limiting who can see stored documents, and time-limited links for anything sensitive. If a security compromise occurs that puts your information at risk, we will notify the Information Regulator and you, as required by POPIA.

You can ask us what information we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it - email the address above. You can also complain to the Information Regulator (South Africa) if you think we have handled your information unlawfully:

Information Regulator (South Africa)
Email: complaints.IR@justice.gov.za
Website: inforegulator.org.za

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This is version 2026-09-05. When we change it materially we publish a new version, and we record which version applied to each request.