I turned 50 a few months ago and am now being bombarded with glossy leaflets, flyers and addressed envelopes with brochures for retirement properties.
It is really pissing me off. I am not elderly. I am nowhere near retirement and will have to work for at least another 15-20 years. I work full-time and have young children. Aside from the fact that these properties are marketed at 'over fifties' with the cut off for entry being 50 - which seems ridiculous to me as there is a big difference between people who are 50 and still working and 70/80 year old retired people, I find these depressing and offensive. I'm talking 4 or 5 a week. Even if I wanted to retire early, I couldn't, and the last place I'd ever buy is a retirement property. We'd downsize to a bungalow if we had to for mobility issues.
All of which is by the by. I am not interested in these properties currently, have not expressed any interest in them and have not consented to be mailed about them.
So I appreciate that there is a marketing database somewhere that has people's DOBs and that the retirement property builders such as McCarthy Stone and Churchill buy this from whoever produces it so that they can target over fifties - I work in Sales so I appreciate how it works. My question is a) can I somehow get my name taken off it (I've tried phoning the individual building companies, has made no difference so far) and b) is this legal from a GDPR perspective - in IT sales we were made to stop targeting people that hadn't consented to receive marketing communications when GDPR came in.