Licensing & caching

This page summarises what you may do with data retrieved from the PropertyData API. It is a plain-English summary of our terms & conditions, which are what actually apply. Almost every licensing question we are asked is answered here, so please read it before writing to us. If your case genuinely is not covered, tell us what you are building and we will answer.

What you may build

An API subscription lets you use our data for any lawful purpose, commercial or non-commercial. That expressly includes putting our data inside a product of your own, showing it to your registered or paying customers, and including it in reports you generate for them. Using the API inside a customer-facing, multi-tenant, paid SaaS product is permitted on every plan.

You do not need our permission, a separate commercial agreement, a redistribution licence or a particular plan tier to do any of this. There is no field we return that you are barred from showing to your users, and no limit on how many customers you have, how many records you display, or how many reports or exports you produce. Your monthly credit allowance is the only limit on how much data you can retrieve.

The one restriction is that you may not publish, sell, license or distribute our data as a product or service that consists substantially of our data without enhancement or added value. The question is whether our data is an input to something of your own making, or whether it is essentially the thing you are selling. Republishing our data as a dataset, download, feed or API of your own is not permitted, and neither is building a searchable copy of it that people can query instead of subscribing to us.

Caching: the 60-day rule

You may store what an API call returns for up to 60 days from the moment you retrieved it. At the end of the 60 days you must either delete that stored copy or replace it by making a fresh call. The 60 days runs from retrieval and is not shortened by your subscription later ending.

The purpose of the limit is to stop the API being used to assemble a standing copy of our data that is then served to other people in place of calling us, which the licences we hold from our own data suppliers do not permit. A useful way to think about it: over time, showing a piece of current data to one of your users should broadly correspond to one call to our API for that data. The call does not have to happen while they are looking at it, and caching within the 60 days so you are not repeatedly asking us for the same thing is exactly what the allowance is for.

What you may keep for longer than 60 days

The 60-day limit applies to our data held as current information. It does not stop you keeping a permanent record of what we told you and when, and it does not restrict what you build out of it. Provided you never present it as current, you may keep indefinitely:

• a dated snapshot of what a call returned for a particular property, such as a valuation, asking price, listing status or set of attributes, held as part of that property's history or of an individual user's history in your application;
• reports, exports and documents you have already produced for your customers, containing figures that were current when they were produced;
• events you derive by comparing successive calls, for example "first seen", "price reduced", "returned to market" or "no longer listed";
• aggregate figures you calculate, such as averages, ranges, benchmarks and indices, and anything you publish from them;
• your own scores, classifications and derived attributes;
• provenance and audit information, such as the parameters you queried, the date of retrieval, sample sizes and your methodology; and
• the PropertyData identifiers you need in order to query the same property again later.

Two conditions apply to all of that. It must be clearly marked as a historical observation and show the date it was retrieved. And it must not be used to answer a question about the present: if your product tells a user what a property is worth, what it is listed at, or whether it is still on the market today, that answer must come from a call made within the last 60 days, not from your historical record.

Attribution

Attribution is not required for anything you build on the API. Naming us as the source is good practice and always appreciated; ask us and we will send you a logo and suggested wording. Screenshots and PDF downloads taken from our website are different, and must acknowledge PropertyData as the source.

Listing links and photographs

Where the API returns a link to an original property listing, it is a forwarding link on the PropertyData domain rather than the portal's own address. You may show these links to your users, and we recommend that you do.

We hold no rights in listing photographs. The image URLs we return point to files hosted by third parties, and our terms permit you nothing in respect of them: displaying, hotlinking, copying, storing and creating thumbnails are all matters between you and whoever owns the image, on which you should take your own advice. Omitting the image and linking to the original listing instead is the approach we recommend.

Bulk data and general listings

Because we licence much of our data in from third parties, we do not sell or licence out raw datasets, bulk extracts, data dumps or update feeds, and we cannot make an exception. The API, a request at a time, is how we make data available. We can sometimes take on a bespoke data project, such as appending our data to a list of addresses you supply.

For the same reason we do not offer a general property listings feed. The sourcing endpoints return only the properties matching one of our specific investment strategies, which is a transformed subset of the market rather than a copy of the portals. If you need comprehensive listings data, you need to go to the portals directly.

Personal data

Some of what we return, such as title ownership information, includes other people's personal data. Once we have supplied it to you, you decide what you do with it and you are its controller from that point. You must have your own lawful basis for using it. See our privacy policy for how we handle personal data.

When your access ends

If you cancel, or we close your account, each piece of data you have already retrieved reaches the end of its 60 days as normal and must then be deleted. You may keep the historical records and derived material described above, and any reports you had already produced, but you may not use them to present current information, and you may not continue to serve our data to others without an active subscription.