Privacy Policy

1. Who we are & what this policy covers

Southern Housing LLC ("Southern Housing," "we," "us," "our") is a residential property management and real estate company operating in Aiken, Barnwell, and Bamberg Counties, South Carolina.

Our mailing address is 13541 Church St, Williston, SC 29853.

This policy applies to all of the following, which we call the "Services":

• scproperty.management — our property management website for rental property owners
• southrent.com — our public rental listings, showing scheduling, and new-listing alerts
• Our internal staff and field applications used to run day-to-day operations
• Phone calls, text messages, and email you exchange with us

Some services are delivered through third-party platforms that keep their own records and publish their own privacy policies — most notably our tenant portal and accounting systems. Where that is the case, we say so below.

2. Information we collect

What we collect depends entirely on your relationship with us. Most visitors to our websites give us nothing at all.

Anyone who simply visits our websites

Our web host records standard server logs — IP address, browser and device type, pages requested, and timestamps — for security, abuse prevention, and reliability. We do not use this to build a profile of you.

Property owners requesting a consultation

Through the contact form on scproperty.management: your name, email address, phone number, the county your property is in, roughly how many properties you own, and anything you write in the message box.

Rental prospects

• New-listing alerts: your name, your mobile number, and the search preferences you choose (area or town, rent range, number of bedrooms, and whether you have pets).
• Match me to a home: if you choose to fill out our Match me to a home form, you give us your name and mobile number, optionally an email address, what you are looking for in a home (bedrooms, rent range, county, when you need to move, pets, and how many adults will live there), and your own estimates for a short set of questions taken from our rental application — your approximate gross monthly income, your approximate credit score, roughly how much you owe in collections and across how many accounts, whether you hold a housing choice voucher, whether you owe a balance to a previous landlord, whether you have an eviction judgment in the past five years, whether you can provide a landlord reference, and whether anyone in the household smokes. Every question on that form is optional and each one offers a “prefer not to say” choice.

  Three things about those answers matter, and we want them in writing:

  • The figures stay in your browser for the estimate. When the page shows you which homes fit and what a move-in would cost, that arithmetic runs on your own device against our published criteria. No score, rating or outcome is calculated on our servers or stored against your name — only the figures you typed are saved.
  • They are your own statements, not a credit check. We do not pull a credit report, a background check, or any consumer report when you submit this form, and nothing you enter is verified at this stage. It is not a consumer report and Section 6 does not apply to it.
  • Nothing is scored and no decision is made automatically. There is no algorithm, no rating, and no automatic approval or denial. A person reads your answers alongside our published rental requirements and decides whether to reach out. Submitting the form is not an application and does not approve or decline you for anything.
  • We use them for one purpose: deciding which homes to tell you about and whether we are likely to be a fit, so you do not spend application and screening fees on a home that will not work out. If you later apply, you go through the normal application and screening process described in Section 6.

  You can ask us to delete a Match me to a home submission at any time — see Section 15.

• Showing requests: your name, phone number, the property, and the time slot you pick. If you have been approved for a self-guided or lockbox showing, we also record that access was granted.

Rental applicants

When you formally apply for a home, you provide identifying and financial information through our application platform. Depending on the application, this can include your full legal name, date of birth, Social Security number, current and prior addresses, employment and income information, rental history and landlord references, and the names of other adults who will live in the home.

We also obtain consumer reports — credit, criminal background, and eviction history — from a screening company. Section 6 explains how that works and what your rights are.

Residents

Lease documents, rent payment and balance history, maintenance and repair requests, communications with us, and — where you or our staff take them — photographs documenting the condition of the home.

Owner clients

Property and ownership details, the banking information needed to send you your owner distributions, and the tax identification information required to issue year-end tax forms.

Employees, contractors, and vendors

Contact details, pay rate, time entries, work notes, job photographs, purchase receipts, and — as described in Section 8 — the approximate location of the device used to clock in and out.

3. Where the information comes from

• Directly from you — forms, applications, phone calls, texts, and email.
• Automatically — server logs when you load a page, as described above.
• From screening companies — consumer reports we request with your written authorization.
• From third parties you point us to — employers, prior landlords, and references you list on your application.
• From public records — county property, tax, and court records used in our real estate work.

4. How we use your information

• Answer your inquiry and provide the service you asked for
• Schedule and conduct property showings
• Send you alerts about new listings that match the preferences you selected
• Evaluate rental applications against our written, uniformly applied criteria
• Prepare and administer leases, collect rent, and account for security deposits
• Coordinate maintenance, repairs, turns, and inspections
• Report to and pay our owner clients, and meet our tax and bookkeeping obligations
• Keep records required by law, and establish or defend legal claims
• Detect fraud, protect our systems, and keep our staff and residents safe

We do not use your information for behavioral advertising, and we do not build marketing profiles about you.

5. Text messaging (SMS)

We text from (803) 266-1012. We use text messaging to confirm showings, send reminders, alert you to new listings you asked to hear about, and handle maintenance and leasing conversations.

Consent

We text you only after you give us your number and agree to be contacted — by submitting a form that says so, by asking us to text you, or by texting us first. Consent to receive texts is never a condition of renting from us, applying, or receiving any service. Providing a mobile number is optional on our forms.

Opting out

• Reply STOP to any message to stop all texts. We will send one confirmation and nothing further.
• Reply HELP for assistance, or call (803) 508-4344.
• Reply START to resume.
• You may also call or email us and ask to be removed. We will honor it the same way.

Message frequency varies. Message and data rates may apply. Carriers are not liable for delayed or undelivered messages.

If you opt out of texts, we may still contact you by phone or email about an active application, lease, or maintenance matter — those are service communications, not marketing.

6. Tenant screening & consumer reports

This section covers consumer reports obtained from a screening company as part of a formal application. It does not cover the self-reported answers on our Match me to a home form, which are your own statements and are never obtained from a consumer reporting agency.

When you apply to rent from us, we obtain consumer reports about you. This is governed by the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), and it gives you specific rights.

• We ask first. We obtain your written authorization before requesting any report, and we use it only to evaluate your application for the home you applied for — never for any other purpose.
• Uniform criteria. We apply the same written screening standards to every applicant, in the same order.
• Adverse action notice. If information in a consumer report causes us to deny your application, require a co-signer, require a larger deposit, or otherwise offer you less favorable terms, we will give you a written adverse action notice. It will identify the screening company that supplied the report, tell you that the screening company did not make the decision and cannot explain it, and tell you that you may obtain a free copy of your report from them and dispute anything inaccurate.
• Disputes. If something in your report is wrong, you have the right to dispute it directly with the screening company, which must investigate. We encourage you to tell us as well so we can reconsider once it is corrected.
• Secure disposal. We securely destroy consumer report information when we no longer need it.

We do not sell, republish, or reuse consumer report information, and we do not use an old report for a new application.

7. Fair housing commitment

Southern Housing LLC complies with the federal Fair Housing Act and the South Carolina Fair Housing Law. We do not make housing decisions — and we do not collect, use, or share information — on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, disability, familial status, or national origin.

The search preferences you give us for listing alerts (area, rent range, bedrooms, pets) are used only to decide which listings to send you. They are never used to steer you toward or away from any neighborhood or property, and they play no role in whether an application is approved.

8. Field staff & contractors

This section applies to people who work on our properties, not to residents, applicants, or website visitors.

Our field application records the approximate location of your device at the moment you clock in and clock out. We use it for one purpose: confirming that a time entry was made at the property being worked on. We do not track your location continuously, we do not track you between jobs, and we do not track you outside working hours. If your device denies the location request, you can still clock in.

The app also stores your time entries, work notes, job photographs, purchase receipts, and pay rate, so that we can pay you accurately, bill work to the correct property, and keep the maintenance records our owner clients rely on.

9. Artificial intelligence

We use AI tools to work faster — drafting replies, summarizing incoming messages, organizing maintenance requests, and reading purchase receipts. To do that, the relevant message or document is sent to our AI provider for processing and returned to us.

Our internal staff assistant is also given the working context it needs to answer a question accurately: our current listings and their details, our published rental requirements, and our upcoming showing schedule. That schedule includes the name and phone number of the person booked for each showing. Nothing from a rental application, and no consumer report, is ever included.

Our AI provider processes this content only to return a result to us, under contract, and does not use it to train its models. It does not receive your application file or your consumer report.

10. Who we share information with

We share personal information only in the situations below.

Service providers who run our systems

These companies process information on our behalf, under contract, only to provide their service to us:

Property owners

If you rent a home we manage, we share what the owner needs to make decisions about their property — application outcomes, tenancy status, rent and balance history, and maintenance records.

Professional advisors

Our accountant, bookkeeper, insurers, and attorneys, when they need it to advise us.

Legal and safety

When required by law, subpoena, or court order; to comply with fair housing, tax, or landlord-tenant obligations; to establish or defend legal claims including evictions and collections; or when we believe in good faith that disclosure is necessary to prevent physical harm, fraud, or a crime.

Business transfers

If we sell, merge, or transfer all or part of our business or a managed portfolio, information may transfer with it. We will require the recipient to honor this policy or give you notice and a choice.

11. We do not sell your personal information

We have never sold personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising. We do not provide your information to data brokers, lead generators, list buyers, or affiliates for their own marketing.

As stated in Section 5, this exclusion applies absolutely to text messaging opt-in data and consent.

12. Cookies & tracking

Our public websites — scproperty.management and southrent.com — run no advertising cookies, no third-party analytics, no advertising pixels, and no cross-site trackers. There is nothing to opt out of, because we do not track you.

Our staff and field applications store a small amount of data in your browser (such as your login session and last-used settings) purely so the app works. That data stays on your device.

Because we do not track visitors, we have nothing to sell or share in response to a browser "Do Not Track" or Global Privacy Control signal. We honor those signals by design.

13. How we protect your information

We use encrypted connections (HTTPS) across our websites and apps, access controls and unique logins for staff, permission rules that keep each app to the data it needs, restricted administrative credentials, and routine backups.

Payment and banking details are handled inside our payment and accounting platforms — we do not store full card or bank account numbers ourselves.

No system is perfectly secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security. Please do not email or text us your Social Security number, date of birth, or financial account numbers. Use our secure application platform, or call us.

14. How long we keep information

We may keep information longer when there is an open dispute, claim, or legal hold.

15. Your rights & choices

South Carolina has not enacted a comprehensive consumer data privacy law, and most state privacy laws that do exist apply only to companies far larger than ours. We extend the following rights to everyone who deals with us, regardless of where you live, because we think you should have them:

• Know and access — ask what personal information we hold about you and get a copy.
• Correct — have inaccurate information fixed.
• Delete — ask us to delete your information, subject to the records we are legally required to keep (see Section 14).
• Opt out of texts — reply STOP, or ask us any way you like.
• Opt out of listing alerts — ask us to remove you from the waitlist at any time.
• No retaliation — we will never deny you housing, charge you more, or give you worse service because you exercised a privacy right.

How to make a request

Call (803) 508-4344 or email Karl@mysouthernhousing.com with the subject line "Privacy Request." Tell us what you want and give us enough detail to find your records.

We will verify your identity before acting — usually by matching what you tell us against what we already have, or by confirming through a phone number or email already on file. We will not create new accounts or collect new sensitive information just to verify you.

We respond within 45 days. If a request is unusually complex we may take up to 45 more days, and we will tell you why before we do. There is no charge unless a request is excessive or repetitive, in which case we will tell you the cost before doing the work.

If you are an authorized agent acting for someone else, send us written proof of authority signed by that person.

If we deny your request, we will tell you why, and you may ask us to reconsider by replying to our decision.

16. Data breach notification

If personal identifying information about a South Carolina resident is acquired by an unauthorized person and its use is reasonably likely to cause illegal use or a material risk of harm, we will notify affected residents in the most expedient time possible and without unreasonable delay, as required by S.C. Code § 39-1-90. Where that law requires it, we will also notify the Consumer Protection Division of the South Carolina Department of Consumer Affairs and the consumer reporting agencies.

17. Children's privacy

Our Services are meant for adults. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13, and our websites are not directed to children.

Rental applications ask for the names and ages of everyone who will occupy the home, including minors, because occupancy standards require it. That information comes from the applying adult, is used only to administer the tenancy, and is never used for marketing.

If you believe a child has given us information directly, contact us and we will delete it.

18. Links to other sites

Our Services link to third-party sites — our tenant portal, our Facebook page, and payment providers among them. We do not control them, and this policy does not apply to them. Please read their privacy policies.

19. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy as our business, our tools, or the law change. The "Last updated" date at the top always reflects the current version. If we make a material change to how we use information you already gave us, we will provide a more prominent notice — by text, email, or a notice on our websites — before it takes effect.

20. Contact us