Privacy Policy
Effective
Grand Design Build Group Inc., operating as Grand Design Build (“we”, “us”, “our”), builds, renovates and designs homes across Toronto and the GTA from 1558 Avenue Road, North York, Ontario. This policy explains what personal information we collect through granddesignbuild.com, why we collect it, who we share it with, how long we keep it, and what you can ask us to do about it.
We handle personal information under Canada’s Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), which governs how private-sector organisations in Ontario collect and use personal information in the course of commercial activity.
If you only read one section, read What we collect and How long we keep it.
What we collect
When you send us an enquiry
Our enquiry form asks for your first and last name, email address, phone number, the address or postal code of the property, the type of project you have in mind, and whatever you choose to tell us about it. Every one of those fields is there because we need it to reply to you and to give you a meaningful answer about your project.
Please do not send us financial information, government identification, health information or anything similar through the form. We never ask for it, and the form is not built to receive it.
Automatically, when you visit
Like almost every website, ours records some technical information when a page is served or a form is submitted:
- your IP address
- your browser and device type (a truncated user agent string)
- the country your request came from
- the pages you visited, and the page that referred you
We use this to keep the site working, to understand which pages are useful, and to detect abuse of the enquiry form.
When you use the client portal
If you become a client, we give you access to a project portal so you can follow schedules, selections, documents and messages. The portal is operated for us by a third-party construction management platform. Information you enter there, including messages and uploaded files, is held on that platform’s systems under our account. The portal is covered by this policy and by that provider’s own terms.
What we do not do
We do not sell personal information. We do not rent or trade mailing lists. We do not use your project details to build advertising profiles.
Why we collect it
We use personal information to:
- Reply to you. Answer your question, arrange a site visit, book a design centre appointment, and prepare a proposal.
- Carry out work you have engaged us for. Design, permits, construction, scheduling, selections, invoicing and warranty service.
- Run and improve the website. Measure which pages people actually use, fix problems, and keep the enquiry form free of automated submissions.
- Meet legal and regulatory obligations. Including records we are required to keep as a licensed home builder and renovator in Ontario, and records required for tax and warranty purposes.
- Send you information you asked for, and, where you have consented, occasional updates about our work. Every such message carries an unsubscribe link, as required by Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation.
Consent
By sending us an enquiry you consent to us using your information for the purposes above. You can withdraw consent at any time by contacting us, subject to legal and contractual restrictions and reasonable notice. Withdrawing consent may mean we can no longer provide a service you have asked for. Withdrawing consent does not affect anything we did while consent was in place.
Who we share it with
We share personal information only with service providers who need it to do something for us, and only as much of it as they need. Today those are:
| Provider | What it handles | Where |
|---|---|---|
| GoHighLevel | Enquiry form submissions and our sales pipeline | United States |
| Brevo | Sending notification and transactional email | European Union |
| Cloudflare | Hosting the website, and short-term storage of enquiries | Global network |
| Google (Analytics, Tag Manager, Ads) | Website measurement and advertising performance | United States |
| Buildertrend | The client project portal | United States |
We may also disclose personal information to our own professional advisers, to trades and suppliers where a project genuinely requires it, and where we are required or permitted to do so by law.
A note on where your information goes. Several of these providers are outside Canada, which means your personal information may be stored or processed in another country and may be accessible to that country’s courts and law enforcement under its own laws. We use established providers with published privacy and security commitments, but we cannot exempt them from the law of the country they operate in.
Cookies and website measurement
A cookie is a small file a website asks your browser to keep. Ours uses them for measurement: Google Analytics tells us how many people reach a page, how they got there, and whether they went on to contact us. Google Tag Manager carries our Google Ads conversion tracking, which tells us which ads produce real enquiries.
You can refuse or delete cookies in your browser settings. Google publishes a browser add-on that opts you out of Google Analytics entirely, at tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout. The site works without any of them. Nothing on this site requires a cookie in order to read a page, contact us, or submit the form.
We do not currently respond to browser “Do Not Track” signals, because there is no agreed standard for what a website should do when it receives one.
How long we keep it
Enquiries submitted through this website are held in our own short-term store for 180 days and then deleted automatically. That deletion is enforced by the storage system itself rather than by someone remembering to do it.
Enquiries and contacts in our customer records are kept while there is an active enquiry or relationship, and for a reasonable period afterwards so that we can answer a question about past work.
Project records are kept for as long as we are required to keep them, which for a licensed builder in Ontario is driven by warranty periods, tax rules and limitation periods, and can be several years after a project is finished.
Website measurement data is kept according to the retention settings of the analytics platform, and is aggregated rather than tied to a named person.
How we protect it
The site is served over HTTPS, so what you type into the form is encrypted in transit. Access to our customer records and project systems is limited to the people who need it, and is protected by individual accounts rather than shared logins. Enquiries written to our short-term store expire automatically, so the default state of old data is that it no longer exists.
No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, and we do not claim otherwise. If a breach occurs that creates a real risk of significant harm, we will notify affected individuals and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada as PIPEDA requires.
Your rights
You can ask us to:
- tell you what personal information we hold about you, how we have used it, and who we have given it to
- correct anything that is wrong or out of date
- delete information, where we are not required to keep it
- stop sending you marketing messages, at any time
Write to the address at the bottom of this page. We will respond within 30 days, which is the period PIPEDA sets. There is no charge for a reasonable request. If we need to refuse part of a request, for example because releasing information would reveal something about another person, we will tell you which part and why.
We may need to confirm who you are before we act on a request. That is a protection for you, not an obstacle.
Children
This website is not directed at children and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 16. If you believe a child has sent us information, contact us and we will delete it.
Third-party links
Our pages link to other websites, including suppliers, the City of Toronto, the HCRA and Tarion. We are not responsible for what those sites do with your information. Read their policies before giving them anything.
Changes
If we change this policy we will change the effective date at the top of the page, and where the change is significant we will say so on the page rather than quietly swapping the text.
Complaints
Start with us. Write to the address below and we will look into it.
If you are not satisfied with our response, you can complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada:
- Online priv.gc.ca
- Phone 1-800-282-1376
Contact
Privacy enquiries, Grand Design Build
1558 Avenue Road, North York, Ontario M5M 3X5
info@granddesignbuild.com · (416) 920-6066
Monday to Friday, 8am to 4pm Eastern.