Privacy Policy

Merit Property Care is a Nigerian property care platform operating in Lagos, Abuja and Port Harcourt. We connect customers with verified independent handymen for cleaning, fumigation, repairs and related services. In this policy, "we" and "us" mean Merit Property Care.

• Contact details — your name, phone number and email address, so we can confirm a booking and reach you about it.
• Property and location details — the address, landmark or bus-stop you give us, and the area and city the job is in. We need this to send a handyman to the right place.
• Booking and job history — what you booked, when, which handyman attended, and the outcome. This builds your property's Digital Property Passport, which is a permanent record of the care that property has received.
• Photos of the work — before, during and after photos taken at your property by the handyman, time-stamped by our server. These are proof the work was done.
• Payment information — we use Paystack to take payments. Paystack handles your card details directly; we never see or store your full card number. We keep a record of the amount, date, and whether the payment succeeded.
• Ratings and reviews you leave for a handyman.

Handymen go through identity verification before they can receive any work. This is the core of the trust promise we make to customers, and it means we collect more from handymen than from customers.

• National Identification Number (NIN) — collected as proof of identity only. Your NIN is encrypted before it is stored, and it is never used as a login credential or password. Handymen sign in with their full name and a PIN they choose themselves.
• Guarantor details — the name, phone number, relationship and address of a person who vouches for you. We may contact your guarantor to verify you.
• Police report and other verification documents where required.
• Location data at check-in — when you start a job, we record a GPS check-in to confirm you attended the property. We do not track your location continuously, and we do not track it when you are not on a job.
• Work record — jobs accepted, rejected and completed, your rating, your trust tier and your reward points.
• Bank details for payment, held so the founder can pay you by bank transfer after a job is approved.

• To take, confirm and carry out bookings, and to send a handyman to the right place.
• To verify that handymen are who they say they are, before they are ever sent to a customer's property.
• To take payment for jobs and subscriptions, and to pay handymen for completed work.
• To keep a permanent, honest record of the care each property has received (the Digital Property Passport).
• To send you messages about your booking by WhatsApp, email or in the app.
• To calculate handyman ratings, trust tiers and reward points.
• To keep the platform secure, investigate misuse, and meet our legal obligations.

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it with advertisers.

Access inside Merit Property Care is restricted by role, and those restrictions are enforced by the platform itself, not by policy alone:

• A handyman assigned to your job sees only what they need to do that job — your name, phone number and the address of the property. They cannot see your payment details or your other bookings.
• A regional administrator sees jobs, customers and handymen in their own city only — never another region's.
• The founder has full access across all regions, and is the only person who handles payments and refunds.
• Other customers and other handymen cannot see your personal details. Public handyman profiles show only a first name, area, tier and rating.

We use a small number of third-party services to run the platform. Each receives only what it needs:

• Paystack — to take payments.
• Supabase — to store our database and uploaded files.
• Vercel — to host the website.
• Resend — to send email.
• WhatsApp Business — to send you booking updates.
• Anthropic (Claude) — to power the property assistant and property health score.

• Sensitive identity data, including NIN, is encrypted before it is stored.
• Passwords and handyman PINs are hashed — we cannot read them, and neither can anyone who obtains our database.
• Our database denies access by default: no data is readable except through our own server, which checks your role first.
• The founder and regional administrators use two-factor authentication.
• Job photos are stored in private storage and time-stamped by our server so they cannot be backdated or faked.
• Every sensitive action is written to an audit log.

No system is perfectly secure, and we do not claim otherwise. If we ever become aware of a breach affecting your information, we will tell you and the relevant authorities as required by law.

We keep booking and property records for as long as the property passport is active, because the value of the passport is that it is permanent. Verification documents are kept for as long as a handyman is active on the platform, and for a period afterwards where the law requires it. You can ask us to delete information we no longer need.

Under the Nigeria Data Protection Act 2023 you have rights over your personal information, including the right to ask for a copy of it, to ask us to correct it, and to ask us to delete it. To exercise any of these, contact us through our support page.

The specific rights, timeframes and any exemptions in this section must be confirmed by a Nigerian lawyer before launch.

Merit Property Care is not intended for children, and we do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18.

If we change this policy we will update the date at the top of this page, and we will tell you directly if the change is significant.

Questions about this policy or about your information? Reach us through the customer support page.