Terms of business — version 1.0
These terms apply to website design, build and ongoing service work carried out by HIVE Estate Agency Systems. They are written to be read, so they are in plain English wherever plain English does the job.
Version 1.0. Issued 13 October 2026. Superseded versions remain available at /terms/.
1. Who we are
1.1 “We”, “us” and “HIVE” mean HIVE Estate Agency Systems, a company registered in England and Wales, company number 07963403, registered office 1 The Links, Herne Bay, Kent CT6 7GQ.
1.2 “You” means the business named in the proposal.
1.3 “The Proposal” means the document we send you setting out what we will build, what it costs and the assumptions it is priced on. “The Website” means what the Proposal describes. “Always Current” means the ongoing monthly service described in clause 9.
1.4 These terms and the Proposal together form the contract between us. Where the Proposal and these terms disagree, the Proposal wins.
2. How the contract starts
2.1 The contract is formed when you accept the Proposal — either through the accept button on it, or in writing by email. Accepting the Proposal means accepting the version of these terms it names.
2.2 A proposal is open for 30 days from the date we send it. After that the price may change, though we will usually honour it if you ask.
2.3 You are entering this contract for business purposes, so the consumer cancellation rights that apply to consumers do not apply here.
3. What we will do
3.1 We will design and build the Website described in the Proposal, connect it to the property management system named there, and make it live.
3.2 Everything listed on our website as included is included — there is no separate charge for individual features, pages, branches or area guides within the scope the Proposal describes.
3.3 Design work is bespoke. We do not work from a template library.
3.4 We will carry out the work with reasonable skill and care, by people competent to do it.
4. The price, and when it is due
4.1 The build price is stated in the Proposal. Unless the Proposal says otherwise, 50% is due on acceptance and the balance on the day the Website goes live.
4.2 Always Current is charged monthly in advance from the date the Website goes live.
4.3 Our prices exclude VAT where VAT applies.
4.4 Invoices are due within 14 days. We may charge interest on late payment at 4% above the Bank of England base rate, which is the rate the Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998 would give us anyway.
4.5 We will not begin build work before the deposit has cleared, and we will not make a site live before the balance has.
5. Assumptions, and changes to scope
5.1 The Proposal lists the assumptions it is priced on — typically the property types, the number of property management systems, whether we are applying your existing brand or creating one, and who is writing the content.
5.2 If something turns out differently once we start, that is a change of scope, not a mistake by either of us. We will tell you what it affects and what it costs before doing the work, and you decide.
5.3 Refinements within the agreed scope are part of the build and are not charged for. Once you have signed off the design, a change to the structure or the page types is a change of scope under 5.2.
5.4 No change to this contract is binding unless it is in writing. An email is in writing.
6. What we need from you
6.1 You will give us the content, images, logos, brand files and account access the Proposal says you are providing, and respond to questions and approval requests within a reasonable time.
6.2 You are responsible for the accuracy of everything you give us, including your fees, your compliance and redress scheme information, and your property particulars. We will build the Website to display that information properly; what it says is yours.
6.3 You confirm you have the right to use everything you give us — particularly photographs, floorplans and logos — and that providing it to us does not breach anybody else’s rights.
6.4 Where we need access to an account of yours (your property management system, your domain, your search or analytics accounts), you will arrange it. We will never ask for your password: these systems all allow a user to be added properly, and that is how we will ask.
6.5 Where a third party you use must act — your IT supplier changing a DNS record, your property management system provider enabling a feed — you are responsible for asking them, and their timescales are not within our control.
6.6 Where we are migrating content from an existing website, you must keep that website online and reachable until we confirm the migration is complete. Content and images are copied from the live site; if it is taken down or its hosting is cancelled before we are finished, that content cannot be recovered and re-creating it is chargeable work.
6.7 If you do not do the things in this clause, our timescales move accordingly and clause 8 may apply.
7. Timescales
7.1 We will give you a target timescale in the Proposal, and we work to it. It assumes you respond and approve within a reasonable time, and it is a target rather than a guaranteed date.
7.2 Where a delay is caused by something outside our control, including anything in clause 6, the timescale extends by the length of the delay.
8. If a project stalls
8.1 Projects occasionally go quiet at the client’s end. That is understandable, and it is also expensive for us, because a half-built site occupies a slot.
8.2 If we have been waiting on you for 30 days, we may pause the project and tell you we have. If we have been waiting 90 days, we may invoice for the work completed to that point and treat the remainder as a new piece of work to be re-quoted when you are ready.
8.3 We will always ask before doing either, and we would far rather hear that you need three months than hear nothing.
9. Always Current
9.1 Always Current is the monthly service that keeps the Website running and improving. It includes:
(a) managed hosting, SSL and monitoring;
(b) management of your property data feed, including fixing it when it breaks;
(c) core, plugin and security updates;
(d) daily backups;
(e) search optimisation work each month;
(f) every improvement we make to our platform, applied to your Website without charge and without you having to ask; and
(g) support by phone and email during working hours.
9.2 The annual design review. On each anniversary we will review the Website’s design with you. The review covers: colours and typography retuned where your brand has moved; homepage and landing page sections reordered, swapped or replaced using components the platform already has; your current photography applied; and your property pages and search brought onto the current version of the platform. We will approach you about it rather than waiting to be asked.
9.3 What the annual review is not. A new visual identity, a new property type with its own templates, or restructuring how the Website is navigated are new pieces of work. We will quote for them, and they are usually a fraction of a new build because the foundations and your content already exist — but they are not within the monthly fee.
9.4 The monthly fee is based on the number of live property listings your Website carries. We will not move you to a higher band until you have been consistently above it for three months, and we will move you down without being asked when your stock falls.
9.5 The minimum term is 12 months from the date the Website goes live. After that, either of us may end it on 30 days’ written notice.
9.6 If Always Current ends, hosting, the property data feed, updates, backups and support stop. Clause 14 covers what happens to the Website itself.
10. Hosting, availability and backups
10.1 We host the Website on infrastructure we manage, and we aim for it to be available at all times. We do not offer a guaranteed uptime figure or service credits, and we would rather say so than imply a guarantee we are not giving.
10.2 We take daily backups and keep them for 30 days. We will restore from backup at no charge where the cause is something we are responsible for.
10.3 We may carry out maintenance that briefly interrupts the Website. Where we can plan it, we will do it outside working hours.
11. Things outside our control
11.1 The Website depends on services other people run: your property management system and its feed, the property portals, public data sources, your domain registrar and your DNS provider. We will work with them and chase them, but we are not responsible for their availability, their accuracy or their decisions.
11.2 Neither of us is liable for failing to do something because of an event genuinely beyond our reasonable control.
12. Search optimisation
12.1 We build the Website to be found, and the monthly service includes search work. We do not guarantee rankings, traffic, enquiries or position for any search term. Nobody can: search engines decide, they change how they decide, and your competitors are working on it too.
12.2 Where we migrate an existing website we will map its addresses onto the new site to protect what you have built. We will take proper care over it; we cannot guarantee that no position will move.
13. Intellectual property
13.1 Everything you give us stays yours.
13.2 On full payment of the build price, we assign to you the rights in the design and the content we create specifically for your Website. It is yours to keep, and to take elsewhere.
13.3 We keep ownership of our own platform — our theme framework, our property data synchronisation, our location data system, and the other software we have built and use across our clients. While you subscribe to Always Current you have a licence to use all of it on your Website. That licence ends when Always Current ends.
13.4 This split is the reason the build price is what it is. We are not rebuilding the same machinery for each client and charging each of them for it.
13.5 We may describe and show the work publicly, including your Website’s name and appearance, unless you ask us in writing not to. We will not publish your commercial results or performance figures without your written agreement.
14. If you leave
14.1 Your domain is yours. Your content is yours. Your property data is yours.
14.2 When Always Current ends we will give you, at no charge, a full export of the Website’s content and database and a copy of your media library, in standard formats, so you or another supplier can set it up elsewhere.
14.3 What you cannot take is the platform software described in 13.3. A site rebuilt elsewhere from your exported content will not include our location data system, our property synchronisation or our framework, because those are ours. Everything that is specifically yours comes with you.
14.4 We will keep your data for 30 days after the service ends, then delete it. Ask within those 30 days if you want anything more.
14.5 Where we can reasonably help a new supplier take over, we will, charged at our standard day rate.
15. Data protection
15.1 Where we handle personal data through your Website — enquiries, applicant registrations, valuation requests — you are the controller and we are the processor. Schedule 1 is our data processing agreement and forms part of this contract.
15.2 You authorise us to use the sub-processors listed in Schedule 2. We will tell you before we add another one, and you may object.
15.3 Each of us will comply with the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018.
16. Confidentiality
16.1 Neither of us will pass on the other’s confidential information, including your client and applicant data and our pricing and methods, except where the law requires it.
16.2 This continues after the contract ends.
17. Liability
17.1 Nothing here limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited.
17.2 Subject to 17.1, our total liability is limited to the total fees you have paid us in the 12 months before the claim.
17.3 We are not liable for loss of profit, loss of business, loss of instructions, loss of goodwill, loss of anticipated savings, or loss of or damage to data, in each case whether direct or indirect.
17.4 We are not liable for anything arising from information you gave us, from your own compliance obligations, or from a third party service failing.
17.5 These limits are a deliberate allocation of risk between two businesses, and our prices reflect them. We would rather point that out plainly than have it discovered in an argument.
18. Suspending and ending the service
18.1 If an invoice is more than 30 days overdue we may suspend the Website and the service, having given you 7 days’ written warning. We will restore it once payment is received.
18.2 Either of us may end this contract immediately if the other commits a serious breach and has not put it right within 30 days of being asked in writing, or becomes insolvent.
18.3 Ending the contract does not affect anything already owed.
19. General
19.1 Neither of us may transfer this contract to anybody else without the other’s written agreement, except to a buyer of substantially the whole business.
19.2 Nothing here makes either of us the other’s partner, agent or employee.
19.3 This contract, including the Proposal and the Schedules, is the whole agreement between us about this work, and replaces anything said beforehand. Neither of us is relying on any statement not written down here.
19.4 Notices may be given by email to the addresses the parties normally use.
19.5 If any part of this contract turns out to be unenforceable, the rest still stands.
19.6 Nobody other than you and us may enforce any part of this contract.
19.7 Not enforcing something immediately does not mean giving up the right to enforce it later.
20. Law and jurisdiction
20.1 This contract is governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction.
Schedule 1 — Data processing agreement
Subject matter. Processing of personal data submitted through the Website, and personal data within your property records, so that the Website can function.
Duration. For as long as we provide the service, plus the 30 day period in clause 14.4.
Nature and purpose. Hosting, storage, transmission of enquiries to you, backup and support.
Types of personal data. Names, email addresses, telephone numbers, postal addresses, enquiry and application content, and technical data such as IP addresses.
Categories of data subject. Applicants, buyers, tenants, vendors, landlords, and your own staff where they appear on the Website.
Our obligations. We will:
(a) process personal data only on your documented instructions, which these terms and the Proposal constitute;
(b) keep it confidential and ensure the people handling it are bound to do the same;
(c) apply appropriate technical and organisational security measures, including encryption in transit, access control, and regular patching;
(d) not engage a sub-processor except as listed in Schedule 2 or notified to you in advance, and impose equivalent obligations on any we do engage;
(e) assist you in responding to data subject requests, and pass any we receive directly to you promptly;
(f) notify you without undue delay, and in any event within 48 hours, on becoming aware of a personal data breach, with the information you need to meet your own obligations;
(g) assist you with data protection impact assessments and with regulator enquiries, so far as is reasonable;
(h) delete or return personal data at the end of the service, per clause 14.4; and
(i) make available the information you reasonably need to demonstrate our compliance, and submit to audit on reasonable notice.
International transfers. Personal data is stored in the United Kingdom. Where a sub-processor would transfer it outside the UK, we will ensure a lawful transfer mechanism is in place and tell you.
Schedule 2 — Sub-processors
The third parties we currently use to deliver the service:
Amazon Web Services — hosting and storage. United Kingdom.
Brevo — sending transactional email, including enquiry notifications. European Union.
Your property management system provider — named in the Proposal. The feed is yours; we read it on your instruction.
We will tell you before this list changes.