To wonder how these firms get my address? Estate Agents etc.

[iscompletelyfine]

Since we put our house on the market a few months ago we've been getting regular items of unsolicited mail, addressed to "the homeowner". They come from surveyors, removals companies, storage companies and estate agencies (who ususually tell us exactly how many days our house has been on the market in the hope that we'll switch to them instead). These companies always have addresses in other parts of the country, suggesting that they're larger firms that operate nationally (for example 'Your Move' is one of the biggest culprits).

They can't be directly mining the address data from Rightmove/Zoopla because that only gives a postcode. So would it be reasonable to assume they're all buying access to a database of addresses? If so, who is compiling the database? Do they have people driving down streets where they know houses are listed, to get the house numbers? Or perhaps all the estate agencies are on some sort of commission to pass addresses on (surely a GDPR breach if so)?

If it's addressed to the homeowner it's not personal data. However you can ask for a subject access request to find out what data they hold.

Is your house address not on your house schedule since it’s for sale ? Or on its home report ? It must be on something that’s on the house for sale advert or else no one would know which house it was.

That’s how you are getting these items of mail sent to you. Your house is advertised on public sites which theses companies will have alerts registered on. So they know to send things to them to drum up business. Happens all the time.

8miss those public sites don't show the full address - only the postcode. That's my point. Where are they getting the extra bit of information from?

It's not that hard to figure out which house it is once you have a postcode....

They have a postcode, and then can use google street view to identify specific house. Not at all difficult

Zoopla and Rightmove show the full address and number of days listed if you log on with an EA log on. It also tracks if you change agent or price change. Information is also stored about how much you paid.

Just after we moved into our newly purchased house we had junk mail addressed to us in person from local and national companies and a few homeowner ones.
We had moved 200 miles and because I was literally just at the end of some cancer treatment and exhausted- hadn't even given my address out to that many people.
I tried to wofk out how the hell furniture, hkme insurance and double glazing companies i had never used and so.e local to our newly movex to area could k ow our new address. In the end I just assumed the estate agents we bought with must have made some money selling our details on. Pissed me off big time.

In fact any company along off my details pissed me off. If I knew 100% who had I'd be asking for my cut of the money. Cheeky Fuckers

We get this whenever someone in our full postcode is selling their house. One place (Estate Agents) wrote to say that they needed to urgently contact us about our house sale - which kind of gave me the creeps.

@Unescorted, that's interesting, thanks. So it shows that information about all houses, not just the ones listed by the agent? I guess Zoopla and Rightmove must be making a lot of money out of making that data available on a commercial basis.

I send all the mail back unopened with a note asking to be removed from the database. If they send any more I contact the head office. I'm not sure if this comes under GDPR or not (as it is just address, not name) but they're not doing themselves any favours. Some days I feel like Mr Weasley in Harry Potter when he sealed up the door but the Hogwarts letters started flying down the chimney .