Privacy policy

Who we are

This privacy policy applies to The City Home Repair ("we," "us," "our"), a handyman service operating out of Oakland and serving San Francisco and the wider Bay Area, and to the website at thecityhomerepair.com.

Information we collect

Information you give us

Every estimate form on this site asks for the same handful of things. When you submit one, we receive:

• Your name — so we know who we're talking to.
• Your phone number — so we can call or text you back with a quote. This is the only contact detail we ask for.
• Your ZIP code (optional) — so we know whether you're in our service area and can price travel honestly.
• The service you need and your description of the job (optional) — whatever you type in the details box.
• Which page you submitted from — so we know what you were reading when you reached out.

Our forms don't ask for an email address. We reply by phone or text, so there's no reason to collect one.

If you call, email, or text us directly, we also have whatever you choose to tell us in that conversation — including your email address if you write to us, and your service address once we schedule a visit.

Information collected automatically

Like almost every website, ours records some technical information when you visit: your IP address, browser and device type, the pages you view, how you arrived (a search, a link, a direct visit), and rough location at the city level. This comes from our web host's standard server logs and from Google Analytics — see cookies and analytics below.

Our estimate form also applies a short-lived, per-IP rate limit to block spam submissions. That check stores a hashed version of the IP address for one minute and nothing else.

What we don't collect

We don't take payment through this website, so we never receive card numbers or bank details here. We don't ask for a Social Security number, a date of birth, or any government ID. We don't run advertising pixels or retargeting tags on this site.

How we use your information

We use what you send us to:

• Reply to your estimate request, usually within 2 hours.
• Ask follow-up questions and price the job accurately.
• Schedule the visit, confirm the appointment, and let you know if we're running late.
• Do the work, order materials for it, and invoice you afterward.
• Handle warranty callbacks — if something isn't right, your original job details tell us what we did.
• Keep basic business records for tax, insurance, and accounting purposes.
• Understand which pages bring in real inquiries, so we know what's worth writing more about.
• Detect and block spam and abuse of our forms.

We do not use your information for automated decision-making or profiling, and we don't add you to a marketing list because you asked for a quote.

Who we share it with

We do not sell your personal information, and we never have. We don't rent it, trade it, or hand it to lead brokers. The only parties who touch it are the services we use to run the business:

• Hostinger — hosts this website and its email. Server logs and inbound mail pass through them.
• Telegram — new estimate requests are delivered to our phones as a private Telegram message so we see them immediately.
• Resend — sends the email copy of each estimate request to our inbox.
• Google Analytics — receives anonymous-ish usage data about site visits, not your form contents. See below.

Each of these acts as a service provider handling data on our behalf, under their own privacy terms. Beyond them, we'll only disclose your information if the law requires it (a subpoena, court order, or lawful government request), if it's needed to establish or defend a legal claim, or if we ever sell or transfer the business — in which case your information would move with it and this policy would continue to apply until you were told otherwise.

Cookies and analytics

This site uses Google Analytics 4 to count visits and see which pages people find useful. Google Analytics sets cookies in your browser and receives your IP address, which Google truncates for location purposes. We use it to look at traffic in aggregate — page views, sources, and whether a page led to an estimate request. We do not send your name, email, phone number, or the contents of your message to Google Analytics.

We don't use advertising cookies, remarketing pixels, or social media trackers on this site.

You can opt out of analytics in several ways:

• Install Google's Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on.
• Block or delete cookies in your browser settings.
• Turn on your browser's tracking protection or a content blocker — most of them block Google Analytics by default, and the site works perfectly well without it.

Some browsers send a "Do Not Track" or Global Privacy Control signal. Because we don't sell or share personal information for advertising, there's nothing for those signals to switch off here — but we honor them as opt-out requests regardless.

For more on how Google handles this data, see Google's privacy policy and how Google uses data from sites that use its services.

Phone calls and text messages

When you call us, standard carrier records apply. We don't record calls. We may jot down job notes from the conversation and keep them with your estimate.

We may text you about your specific job — confirming an appointment, letting you know we're on the way, or sending a photo of something we found. That's it. We don't send marketing or promotional text messages. Message and data rates from your carrier may apply. Reply STOP at any time and we'll call you instead.

Job photos

We often photograph completed work for our portfolio and for our own records. These are photos of the work — a patched wall, a mounted TV, a rebuilt fence section. We don't publish your name, your address, or anything that identifies your home, and we don't photograph the inside of your home beyond the work area.

If you'd rather we didn't photograph your job at all, just say so — before, during, or after. If a photo of your job is already on the site and you want it taken down, email us and we'll remove it.

How long we keep information

• Estimate requests that don't become jobs: we keep them while we're following up, then clear them out. If you tell us you're not interested, we'll delete your details on request.
• Completed job records: kept for at least four years, because tax, insurance, and warranty obligations require it. California's statute of limitations on construction work can run longer, so we may retain basic job records beyond that.
• Analytics data: retained on Google's standard schedule, currently 14 months for user-level data.
• Server logs: rotated by our host on their standard schedule, typically a few weeks.

How we protect it

This site is served over HTTPS, so what you type into the estimate form is encrypted in transit. Form submissions go straight to our messaging and email accounts rather than into a public database on this website. The accounts we use are protected with strong passwords and two-factor authentication where available, and only the owner and working crew see job details.

No system is perfectly secure, and we won't pretend otherwise. If a breach ever affected your personal information, we'd notify you as required by California law.

Your choices and rights

Whatever state you're in, you can ask us to:

• Tell you what we have — a plain list of the information we hold about you.
• Correct it — fix a wrong phone number, email, or address.
• Delete it — we'll remove what we're not legally required to keep for tax, insurance, or warranty reasons.
• Stop contacting you — we'll close out your inquiry and leave you alone.

Email info@thecityhomerepair.com or call (415) 936-4709. We'll respond within 30 days, and there's no charge. We may need to confirm you're the person who submitted the request before we act on it — usually by replying from the same email address or phone number.

We will never treat you differently, refuse service, or change your price because you exercised any of these rights.

California privacy rights

The California Consumer Privacy Act, as amended by the CPRA, gives California residents specific rights over their personal information. A business of our size is below the CCPA's revenue and volume thresholds, so it likely doesn't apply to us by law — but we honor these rights anyway, because they're reasonable:

• Right to know what personal information we've collected, where it came from, why we collected it, and who we disclosed it to.
• Right to delete personal information we hold about you, subject to the record-keeping exceptions above.
• Right to correct inaccurate personal information.
• Right to opt out of sale or sharing — there's nothing to opt out of. We do not sell or share personal information as those terms are defined under the CCPA, and we haven't in the preceding 12 months. That includes the personal information of anyone we know to be under 16.
• Right to limit use of sensitive personal information — we don't collect the categories California defines as sensitive.
• Right to non-discrimination for exercising any of the above.

In CCPA terms, the categories we collect are identifiers (name, email, phone, ZIP, IP address), commercial information (services you inquired about or purchased), and internet activity (pages viewed on this site). We collect them from you directly and from your device when you browse, and we use them for the business purposes listed in section 03.

To make a request, contact us at info@thecityhomerepair.com or (415) 936-4709. An authorized agent may submit a request on your behalf with written permission from you.

Separately, California's "Shine the Light" law (Civil Code §1798.83) lets residents request a list of personal information disclosed to third parties for their direct marketing purposes. We don't make any such disclosures.

Children's privacy

This site is for homeowners, renters, and property managers hiring a handyman. It isn't directed at children, and we don't knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 13. If you believe a child has sent us information, email us and we'll delete it.

Links to other sites

Our pages link out to places like Google Maps, our Google Business Profile and reviews, and the California Contractors State License Board. Once you follow one of those links you're on someone else's site, under their privacy policy, not ours. We're not responsible for how they handle your information.

Changes to this policy

If we change how we handle information, we'll update this page and change the "last updated" date at the top. Material changes — a new category of data, a new service provider, anything that meaningfully affects you — will be described here rather than slipped in quietly. Continuing to use the site after an update means you accept the revised policy.

How to reach us

Questions about this policy, or want your information deleted? Contact us directly — a real person reads it.

See also our Terms of Service.