Privacy Policy

We publish educational research about alpine property markets. That's all this website does. There's no account system here, no checkout that stores your card, no comment section, and no tracking pixels quietly profiling your reading habits. Because the site is deliberately simple, this policy can be plain, too. It explains what we collect, why we collect it, what we refuse to do with it, and how you can ask us to show you or erase anything we hold about you. If you'd rather talk to a person than read a policy, you're always welcome to write to research@tyrol-crest-estates.com and ask.

The short version

If you never contact us, we collect almost nothing about you beyond the routine server log entries every website generates. If you do contact us through the form or by email, we keep that correspondence in our Jersey City office for up to 24 months and then delete it. We don't sell data, we don't rent data, we don't run third-party advertising trackers, and we don't add you to a newsletter unless you explicitly ask to be added. The cookie banner exists because we offer optional, privacy-respecting analytics; your choice is stored in your own browser and you can change it at any time. Weather data on our market pages comes from Open-Meteo, and your browser talks to their servers directly — those requests never pass through us, so we receive nothing from them.

What we collect

Contact form submissions

The contact form asks for five things: your name, your email address, a budget range, a topic of interest, and a free-text message. Every field other than your name, email, and message is optional. The budget range field uses broad brackets rather than exact figures, because we ask for it only to route your question to the right researcher — someone asking about a €180,000 studio in the Stubaital needs different material than someone comparing €2 million chalets in Kitzbühel. The topic field helps us answer with the relevant market notes instead of a generic reply.

When you submit the form, the contents travel to us as an ordinary email. Nothing you type is stored in a website database, because this site doesn't have one. There is no user profile being built in the background. The message lands in the inbox at our Jersey City office, gets read by a person, and gets a reply written by a person.

Server logs

Like nearly every website on the internet, our hosting provider keeps standard server logs. A log entry typically records the IP address the request came from, the date and time, the page requested, the browser type, and the referring address if you followed a link to reach us. These logs exist for operational and security reasons: they help us spot broken pages, block abusive traffic, and diagnose technical problems. We don't use server logs to identify individual visitors, we don't combine them with contact form data, and we don't share them with marketers. Log files rotate and age out automatically under our host's standard retention schedule.

Cookie choices

If you interact with the cookie banner, the choice you make — accept analytics, or keep things essential-only — is the one piece of information we deliberately store. Importantly, it's stored in your own browser's local storage, not on our servers. We don't know and can't look up what you chose; only your browser knows, and it remembers so the banner doesn't pester you on every page load. Details of how this works are in the cookie section below.

What we never do

Some privacy policies bury the reassuring parts. We'd rather put them up front, as a list of commitments:

We never sell personal information. Not to data brokers, not to "partners," not to anyone, for any price. There is no revenue line in our business that depends on your data. We earn money by selling digital research guides, full stop.

We never run third-party advertising trackers. You won't find advertising network scripts, social media pixels, or cross-site retargeting beacons on these pages. Nothing here follows you around the web after you leave, because nothing here knows where you go next.

We never add you to a newsletter you didn't ask for. If you write to us with a question, you'll get an answer to that question. You won't start receiving a weekly market digest, a "welcome sequence," or holiday greetings. We do occasionally send a short research update to people who have explicitly requested it, and every such email includes a working way to opt back out.

We never buy data about you. We don't enrich contact submissions with purchased demographic or behavioral data, and we don't run your email address against third-party databases to learn more about you. What you tell us is all we know, and we think that's how it should be.

We never hold payment card details. Purchases of our digital guides are handled by our payment processor under their own privacy policy. Card numbers never touch our systems or our email.

How the cookie banner works

When you first visit, a small banner offers you two choices. Essential only means the site uses nothing beyond what it technically needs to function — and in practice, this site needs almost nothing. There's no login session to maintain and no shopping cart to remember. Analytics means you allow a lightweight, privacy-respecting measurement of page visits so we can tell which market pages people actually read. That helps us decide, for example, whether to update the Ötztal notes before the Stubaital ones. The analytics we use count visits and rough geography at the country level; they don't build individual profiles, and they aren't shared with advertisers.

Whichever you choose, the decision is written to your browser's local storage as a small flag. On your next visit, the site reads that flag from your browser and quietly honors it — no banner, no re-asking. Two consequences follow from this design. First, the record of your choice lives on your device, not with us; clearing your browser's site data erases it, and the banner will appear again on your next visit as if you'd never been here. Second, because the flag is per-browser, a choice you make on your laptop doesn't follow you to your phone. If you'd like to change your mind without wiping anything, our Cookie Controls page explains exactly how to reset the stored choice.

Open-Meteo weather calls

Several of our market pages show current weather conditions for the valley or resort being discussed, because snowfall and temperature patterns matter to anyone thinking about a seasonal rental. Those weather displays work differently from most embedded content. When the page loads, your browser makes a request directly to api.open-meteo.com, a free weather data service, and the response is rendered on your screen. The request never passes through our servers. That means we don't see it, we don't log it, and we receive nothing from Open-Meteo about who asked for what. From our side, the weather feature is invisible. From Open-Meteo's side, your browser's request is governed by their own terms and privacy practices, which you're welcome to review on their site. If you'd prefer your browser not to make that call, the pages remain fully readable with third-party requests blocked — the weather figure simply won't fill in.

How long we keep emails

Correspondence — contact form submissions and direct emails, plus our replies — is retained for a maximum of 24 months from our last exchange, then deleted. Two years is long enough to be useful if you write back months later with a follow-up question about the same market, and short enough that we're not hoarding old conversations indefinitely. If you'd like your correspondence removed sooner, a single email asking us to delete it will do the job; see the rights section below. Purchase records for digital guides are kept longer where tax and accounting rules require it, but those records contain your name, email, and transaction reference — never card numbers — and are held separately from general correspondence.

Where your data lives

The correspondence we hold is stored on systems administered from our principal office at 180 Morgan Street, Suite 1000, Jersey City, NJ 07302, USA. Access is limited to the small number of people who answer reader mail. Our Austrian office, Tyrol Crest Estates GmbH at Maria-Theresien-Straße 18, 6020 Innsbruck, may handle questions originally sent in German or about the Austrian entity, so a message you send us may be read in Innsbruck if that's where the right answer sits. Both offices operate under this same policy.

A note for EU visitors — and for US visitors

A good share of our readers are in the European Union and the United Kingdom, which is natural for a site about Austrian property. If you're visiting from the EU, the General Data Protection Regulation gives you a defined set of rights over your personal data, and we honor them regardless of where you're writing from. The lawful basis for what little processing we do is straightforward: when you contact us, we process your message to respond to you, which is a legitimate interest and, once a conversation is underway, a step you asked us to take. Optional analytics run only after you've consented through the banner, and you can withdraw that consent by resetting your cookie choice at any time. Because our main establishment for this site is in the United States, data you send us will be processed there; the protections described in this policy apply to it all the same.

If you're visiting from the United States, the state-level privacy laws now in force in places like California, Virginia, and others mostly regulate businesses that sell data or profile consumers at scale. We do neither. Still, the practical rights those laws describe — knowing what a company holds about you, correcting it, and having it deleted — are rights we extend to every visitor as a matter of policy, whatever your state's legislature has or hasn't gotten around to. You shouldn't need a statute to get a straight answer about your own data.

Your rights: access and deletion

You may ask us, at any time, to confirm whether we hold any personal information about you, to send you a copy of it, to correct anything that's wrong, or to delete it. The way to exercise any of these rights is simple: email research@tyrol-crest-estates.com with the subject line "Privacy request" and tell us what you'd like. We answer privacy requests within 30 days, usually much faster. We may need to confirm that the request genuinely comes from you — typically by replying to the address we have on file — before deleting or disclosing anything, which protects you from someone else making requests in your name. There's no fee, no form to download, and no requirement to justify the request. If we can't fully comply for some reason — for instance, a transaction record we're required by tax law to retain — we'll tell you exactly what we deleted, what we kept, and why we kept it.

Children

This site is written for adults researching property investment. It's not directed at children, we don't knowingly collect information from anyone under 16, and the contact form asks for nothing age-related. If you believe a child has sent us personal information, write to us and we'll delete it promptly.

Changes to this policy

If we change how we handle personal information, we'll update this page and adjust the "what we collect" sections to match reality before any change takes effect. Because the site has no accounts and no mailing list you didn't request, this page is the notice — so if you care about privacy policies, it's worth a glance now and then. We don't expect the substance to change often; our whole approach is to collect less, not to find new things to collect.

Questions about privacy

Privacy questions, requests, and complaints all go to the same place: research@tyrol-crest-estates.com, or by post to Tyrol Crest Estates LLC, 180 Morgan Street, Suite 1000, Jersey City, NJ 07302, USA, or by phone at +1 (201) 555-0148. EU-based readers who prefer German may contact our Innsbruck office at innsbruck@tyrol-crest-estates.com or +43 512 890 341. If you're in the EU and believe we've mishandled your data, you also have the right to lodge a complaint with your local supervisory authority — though we'd genuinely appreciate the chance to put things right first.