Privacy Policy

Wieland & Associates Inc. is a real-estate appraisal firm serving Ottawa, Eastern Ontario and the Gatineau area. We are responsible for the personal information collected through this website.

Our Privacy Officer is accountable for our compliance with this policy. You can reach the Privacy Officer at info@wielandappraisals.com or 613-701-6253, or by mail at 150 Elgin St, 8th Floor, Ottawa, ON K2P 2P8.

Information you give us. When you submit our contact / appraisal-request form, we collect your first and last name, email address, and telephone number; the property address for the appraisal; and details about your request (report type, property type, purpose, dwelling style and type, whether a retrospective appraisal is needed, and any additional information you choose to provide).

Information collected automatically. Like most websites, we collect standard usage information through Google Analytics — for example the pages you visit, approximate (city-level) location derived from your IP address, and your device and browser type. This is collected using cookies (see "Cookies and analytics" below).

We collect and use your personal information to:

• respond to your enquiry and prepare a quote;
• carry out and deliver the appraisal services you request;
• keep the records our professional practice requires; and
• operate, maintain and improve this website.

We do not use your information for any purpose other than those described here without your consent.

By submitting our form, you consent to our collecting and using your personal information for the purposes described above. For our clients in Québec, consent is sought in a manner that is clear, free and informed, and separately for each distinct purpose where required.

You may withdraw your consent at any time by contacting our Privacy Officer, subject to the legal and professional record-keeping obligations that apply to appraisers. Withdrawing consent may mean we can no longer provide a requested service.

When you first visit our site, analytics cookies are switched off. We use Google Analytics 4 to understand how visitors use the site only if you accept analytics cookies through the consent banner shown on your first visit. You can decline and still use the entire site, and we ask for your choice again periodically.

We do not use advertising or cross-site tracking cookies, and we do not sell your data. You can also change or clear your choice at any time through your browser settings, or opt out of Google Analytics using Google's browser opt-out add-on.

This opt-in approach reflects the consent requirements of Québec's Law 25 for technologies that can identify, locate or profile you.

We use reasonable administrative, technical and physical safeguards to protect your personal information, including encryption of data in transit (HTTPS), restricting access to staff who need it, and using reputable service providers that maintain their own security controls. No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.

Appraisal requests submitted through the form are stored using Google Firebase (Firestore) in a Canadian data centre (Montréal, Québec), which helps keep your data in Canada.

Some processing may occur outside Québec or outside Canada: email notifications are delivered through EmailJS, and website analytics are provided by Google. These providers may process limited personal information outside Canada, and we require providers to protect it with comparable safeguards. For our Québec clients, we assess such transfers before personal information is communicated outside Québec, as Law 25 requires.

We do not sell or rent your personal information. We share it only with the service providers that help us run this website and respond to you:

• Google (Firebase & Google Analytics) — website hosting, secure storage of your request, and site analytics;
• EmailJS — delivery of the email notification of your request to our team.

We may also disclose information where required by law or by the professional regulations that govern appraisers.

We keep your personal information only as long as necessary for the purposes set out in this policy. Where we prepare an appraisal, we retain the related records for at least six (6) years, consistent with the professional and tax record-keeping requirements that apply to our practice. Enquiries submitted through the form that do not lead to an engagement are kept only as long as needed to respond to you. When information is no longer needed, we securely delete or de-identify it.

If you are in Québec (including Gatineau), Québec's Law 25 gives you additional protections. In summary: we seek your consent separately for each purpose; we assess transfers of personal information outside Québec before making them; and you have rights of access and rectification and, as these are phased in under the law, rights to de-indexing and data portability. Our Privacy Officer (above) is the person responsible for the protection of personal information. You may also contact Québec's Commission d'accès à l'information (CAI).

Under PIPEDA (and, for Québec residents, Law 25) you have the right to request access to the personal information we hold about you, to ask us to correct it, and to withdraw your consent to our continued use of it. To exercise any of these rights, contact our Privacy Officer using the details above. We do not use automated decision-making or profiling to make decisions about you.

If a breach of security safeguards creates a real risk of significant harm (or, for Québec residents, a risk of serious injury), we will report it to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada and, where applicable, to Québec's Commission d'accès à l'information, and we will notify affected individuals. We keep an internal record of breaches as required by law.

If you have a question or concern about your privacy, please contact our Privacy Officer first — we will look into it and respond. If you are not satisfied with our response, you may contact the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada or, if you are in Québec, the Commission d'accès à l'information du Québec.

• Wieland & Associates Inc.
• 150 Elgin St, 8th Floor, Ottawa, ON K2P 2P8
• Email: info@wielandappraisals.com
• Phone: 613-701-6253

We currently do not send marketing or promotional emails. If we introduce such messages in the future, we will obtain the consent required under Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) and include a way to unsubscribe in every message.

Our services and this website are directed to adults. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children. If you believe a child has provided us information, please contact us and we will delete it.

Our website may link to third-party sites, such as Google or our social-media pages. We are not responsible for the privacy practices or content of those sites, and we encourage you to review their policies.

We may update this policy from time to time. When we do, we will revise the "last updated" date shown above and post the updated version on this page. Material changes will be highlighted here.