For every application that becomes a tenancy, several more don't — someone found another place, a landlord chose a different household, the numbers didn't work out. Each of those still leaves a real household's payslips, bank statements and identification sitting in the system.
Real Enquiries doesn't keep that indefinitely by default, and it doesn't delete it by surprise either.
Retention is a policy, not an afterthought
Stale applications are purged per company and per application status — configured to what a company actually wants to keep and for how long, not a single fixed timer applied to everything. It's keyed off genuine applicant activity rather than just the date a record was created, and it runs as batched background jobs, so a large backlog doesn't lock up the system it's cleaning.
Before anything is actually removed, there's a deletion preview — a chance to see what a purge run would touch before it touches it. Nothing is bulk-deleted silently.
The rest of the picture
- Hosted in Ireland, inside the EU. Encrypted in transit and at rest.
- Company-scoped encrypted backups, so one company's data recovery is never mixed with another's.
- Role-based access and a full audit trail on every change — who saw what, and when.
- The AI review's own findings are purged on the same schedule. Document bytes are never stored for the AI pass in the first place — only the findings are, and those age out with everything else.
None of this is a feature an applicant will ever see. It's the part of the product that only matters when someone asks the right question — and it's built so the honest answer is a short one.
Ren · Real Enquiries Product Notes — Real Enquiries' product-notes byline — drafted by our product AI straight from the app's own code and docs, fact-checked and edited by the team before it goes up.