WEBSITE TERMS OF USE

This document (along with our Privacy Policy) sets out the terms and conditions upon which Property Gene Limited (UK company number: 14281958), whose registered office is at 124 City Road, London, EC1V 2NX, will allow all users and guests to view and use its website.

WEBSITE USE

This page contains the terms which apply to your use of our website, whether you are a visitor or a registered user.

You should read these terms carefully before you start to use the site. By using the site, you accept these terms and agree to comply with them. If you do not agree to these terms, please do not use the site.

USING OUR SITE – CONDITIONS APPLYING TO ALL USERS

We are a marketplace that enables providers of building, construction and related services (‘Contractors’) and customers looking for those services (‘Customers’) to meet each other.

You must be over the age of 18 to use our site.

We allow you to access our site on a temporary basis only and reserve the right to change or remove the services, or any of them, that we provide via our site without notice.

If it is necessary for us to intentionally interrupt any services on our site, we will try to provide users with reasonable notice where this is possible and when we think the down time is such as to justify telling users. Users acknowledge that our site and its services may also be interrupted unintentionally for many reasons beyond our control. Users agree that we will not be liable to users for any loss, foreseeable or not, arising from any interruption to our services.

From time to time, we may require users to register with our site in order to access some parts of it, or the whole site, at our discretion.

If we have provided you with, or you have selected, a user identification code, password or any other information as part of our security procedures, you must treat such information as confidential, and you must not disclose it to anyone. We reserve the right at any time to disable any user identification code or password, whether chosen by you or allocated by us, if in our opinion you have failed to comply with any of our terms of use.

Users may not transfer or share any account they may have with us with any other person (nor allow any other person to use, or have access to, their account). When a user accesses our website, they accept responsibility for any action done by any person in their name or using their account or password.

We reserve the right to request proof of identity for all users, including but not limited to:

(a)   a copy of certain Government issued ID cards, as we may accept from time to time;

(b)   a copy of a recent utility bill showing the user’s name and address (less than 3 months old).

You are responsible for making all arrangements necessary to enable you to have access to our site, including (but not limited to) a suitable and stable internet connection.

We reserve the right to refuse to provide an account to any person or entity for any reason (and to suspend or cancel an account), at our absolute discretion.

CONTRACTS BETWEEN CUSTOMERS AND CONTRACTORS

Whether or not a project is contracted for is entirely at the discretion of the Customers and Contractors. We have no control over this process. All details of the project, price and all other requirements must be agreed between the Customer and the Contractor. There is no contract between us and the Customer and/or Contractor relating to the project, other than as stated herein. The contract to perform the project is only between the Customer and the Contractor. All users are third parties unconnected to us, are completely independent and work for themselves and are not agents, employees, directors, partners or sub-contractors of ours. Any rights which may be available to Customers, such as cancellation rights, rights to implied terms, etc. can only be exercised by the Customer against the Contractor directly.

Customers who require construction and related projects to be performed for them by Contractors can contact us with their project. We may or may not be able to refer the Customer to a suitable Contractor. Customers understand and agree that we may charge the Contractor a fee and/or commission for referring the project to the Contractor.

We make no representation or warranty that any of the services provided by the independent Contractors that we may refer you to, will be useful to you; or of satisfactory quality or provided with any particular level of skill; or are fit for a particular purpose. We will only make reasonable endeavours to refer you to a Contractor relevant to you and only if possible, given the geographic area in which you are based and the geographical area of the Contractors that we are aware of.

Although we may make certain checks of the Contractors, you must make your own checks on whether a person is suitable or not for you and whether they have the necessary insurance or the required qualifications.

Customers may make payments to a Contractor for their services using an escrow account operated via a third-party API embedded into our website. All such payments will be via third-party technology, over which we have no control, and are subject to third-party terms and conditions – as such, we accept no liability or obligation to you in relation to the same.

CONTRACTOR AGREEMENT

Any Contractor who wishes to receive referrals from us must sign up to our written Contractor Agreement. Please contact us to see this Agreement or to discuss details. We reserve the right to accept or refuse people or entities as being a Contractor which we may refer Customers to at our absolute discretion.

CUSTOMER FEEDBACK

Users must not provide untrue feedback, influence or pressure another user by threatening negative feedback or offer incentives in exchange for feedback. Any such attempts should be reported immediately to us. Feedback comments that are reported to us, or which we perceive as being, defamatory, abusive or offensive will be reviewed and may be removed at our absolute discretion.

Reviews might be directly via our website, or use third party applications or services.

FEES

We may make changes to our service fees from time to time. These changes may be reflected in updated Terms of Use or might take effect as an amendment to the Contractor Agreement; and will apply to any referrals or other transactions which take place after the updated fees come into force.

RELIANCE ON WEBSITE CONTENT

Whilst we take all reasonable steps to ensure the accuracy of the commentary, blog, FAQ and other materials posted on our site, these are not intended to amount to advice on which reliance should be placed. We do not accept any liability arising from any reliance placed on such materials by any registered user, visitor to our site, or by any third party.

We claim no expert knowledge in any of the services which are provided by the independent Contractors that we may refer to you.

ACCEPTABLE USE POLICY

Customers who are looking to find Contractors to perform a project on their behalf may contact us via any of the options on our site from time to time, which may include calling us and/or sending details of the project via our enquiry form.

When using our site, you must comply with the requirements set out below.

PROJECTS THAT CUSTOMERS WANT CONTRACTORS TO PERFORM

Projects that do not adhere to these policies will be removed from our site, and/or will not be considered suitable to be passed on to Contractors.

We also may remove any other listings which we consider inappropriate. We may also remove listings if a Customer is posting them excessively.

Prohibited projects:

• Fraudulent, illegal or misleading products or services
• Listings for services which if provided would breach any third-party rights, including the terms and conditions or similar documents of other websites
• Spam or listings posted purely for the purpose of promoting another business or service which is similar to ours
• Offers of permanent employment, or similar work
• Work that is not paid for, or where the pay is only via commission, profit share or other products/services are provided in return

CONTRACTOR PROFILES

Profiles that do not adhere to these policies will be removed, amended or suspended until the user amends them. We also may remove any other profiles or parts of profiles which we consider inappropriate.

A profile may not include anything of the following nature:

• Fraudulent, illegal or misleading products or services
• Listings for services which if provided would breach any third-party rights, including the terms and conditions or similar documents of other websites
• Spam or listings posted purely for the purpose of promoting another business or service similar to ours
• Offers of permanent employment, or similar work
• Offers for work that is not paid for, or where the pay is only via commission, profit share or other products/services are provided in return

The Contractor should:

• Make sure that all of the information contained in their profile is a true, complete and not misleading representation of them.

GENERAL USE OF OUR SITE

Prohibited Uses

You may use our site only for lawful purposes. You must not use our site:

1. in any way that breaches any applicable local, national or international law or regulation;
2. in any way that is unlawful or fraudulent, or has any unlawful or fraudulent purpose or effect;
3. to send, knowingly receive, upload, download, use or re-use any material which does not comply with our content standards;
4. to transmit, or procure the sending of, any unsolicited or unauthorised advertising or promotional material or any other form of similar solicitation (spam);
5. to knowingly transmit any data, send or upload any material that contains viruses, Trojan horses, worms, time-bombs, keystroke loggers, spyware, adware or any other harmful programs or similar computer code designed to adversely affect the operation of any computer software or hardware.

You also agree not to:

1. reproduce, duplicate, copy, licence or re-sell any part of our site or attempt to do such things; or
2. access without authority, interfere with, damage or disrupt any part of our site, any equipment or network on which our site is stored, any software used in the provision of our site, or any equipment or network or software owned or used by any third party.

Breach of acceptable use policy

We will determine, in our discretion, whether there has been a breach of this acceptable use policy through your use of our site. When we determine that a breach has occurred, we may take such action as we deem appropriate.

Failure to comply with this acceptable use policy constitutes a material breach of the terms of use of which it forms part, and may result in our taking all or any of the following actions:

1. Immediate, temporary or permanent withdrawal of your right to use our site;
2. Immediate, temporary or permanent removal of any posting or material uploaded by you to our site;
3. Issue of a warning to you;
4. Legal proceedings against you for reimbursement of all costs on an indemnity basis (including, but not limited to, reasonable administrative and legal costs) resulting from the breach;
5. Disclosure of such information to law enforcement authorities as we reasonably feel is necessary.

We exclude liability for actions taken in response to breaches of this acceptable use policy. The responses described in this policy are not limited, and we may take any other action we reasonably deem appropriate.

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS

We are the owner or the licensee of all intellectual property rights in our site, and in the material (including any elements of text, graphics, images, trademarks, company or business names, logos or pictures) it contains. Those materials are protected by copyright laws and treaties around the world, and we reserve all our rights in this respect. Copying or distributing any of them in full or in part without our permission is prohibited.

COMPETITION

Users agree unconditionally not to, whether directly or indirectly, for themselves or on behalf of another party: create or develop any products or services that are the same or similar to the products or services created by us; or carry out any processes, make any inventions, further developments, or applications for any intellectual property rights, from or based upon any confidential information received from ourselves in any way.

CHANGES TO WEBSITE

We aim to review and update our site regularly; however, we cannot guarantee that the material on our site will not be out of date at any given time, and we are under no obligation to update such material. We may change the content of our site at any time and we are entitled to suspend access to our site, or close it indefinitely, without notice.

LINKING TO OUR SITE

You may link to our home page, provided you do so in a way that is fair and legal and does not damage our reputation or take advantage of it. You must not however establish a link in such a way as to suggest any form of association, approval or endorsement on our part where none exists. Our site must not be framed on any other site, nor may you create a link to any part of our site other than the home page. We reserve the right to withdraw linking permission without notice. The website from which you are linking must comply in all respects with the content standards set out in our acceptable use policy above.

LINKS FROM OUR SITE

Where our site contains links to third party sites and resources, these links are provided for your information only. You acknowledge that we have no control over the contents of those sites or resources and accept no responsibility for them or for any loss or damage that may arise from your use of them.

JURISDICTION AND APPLICABLE LAW

These terms of use and any dispute or claim (including non-contractual disputes or claims) arising out of or in connection with it or its subject matter or formation shall be governed by and construed in accordance with the law of England and Wales. Each party irrevocably agrees that the courts of England and Wales shall have exclusive jurisdiction to settle any dispute or claim (including non-contractual disputes or claims) arising out of or in connection with these terms of use or their subject matter.