A plain statement of the product decisions we have made on purpose.
RentManager NZ is built by a NZ-resident landlord who self-manages four Auckland CBD apartments. Nick Georgiev, the founder, is of EU heritage (Bulgarian-born, New Zealand resident since 2011) and draws the ethical line on privacy and AI to match the strongest institutional protections in the world: the EU General Data Protection Regulation and the EU AI Act. We use those as the minimum standard, not the finish line.
That has real product consequences. Here is what RentManager NZ will never do to your data or your applicants' data, even if a future competitor does it and the technology makes it tempting.
Some property management tools offer "social checks" that scrape an applicant's LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, or other public profiles and feed the result into a trustworthiness score. We do not.
This is a discrimination risk under the New Zealand Human Rights Act 1993, a consent risk under the Privacy Act 2020, and as of 2 February 2025 a prohibited practice under EU AI Act Article 5(1)(c) for any vendor with EU exposure. The Act explicitly bans AI systems that classify people based on social behaviour with outcomes that affect them in unrelated contexts (like housing). The EU got this right. We agree.
We screen applicants using verified information the applicant consents to: credit history via Centrix, landlord references, employment verification, ID via RealMe, and Ministry of Justice courts search. The landlord sees the raw data and makes the decision. No AI score. No social profile. No proxy for a protected characteristic.
When you dictate inspection notes in RentManager, the speech recognition runs on your own device using the browser's built-in engine. Audio never leaves your phone. No data sent to OpenAI, no cloud transcription vendor, no recording retained. This is one of the reasons we will probably never be the flashiest AI in NZ property management, and we are fine with that.
RentManager NZ runs on AWS Auckland, region ap-southeast-6. Your tenant records, financial transactions, documents, and bond information are stored in New Zealand. This is a Privacy Act 2020 obligation (IPP 12) that we take literally.
For full disclosure: our outbound email relay goes through AWS SES in Sydney, because Amazon does not operate SES in the Auckland region. Practically this means very little. SES is a transport service, not a store: messages are encrypted end-to-end in transit over TLS, relayed in milliseconds, and immediately discarded. Nothing persists at SES. And most NZ residents already read their email through providers hosted outside New Zealand (Gmail, Outlook, iCloud, Yahoo), so an email you send from RentManager will almost always land in a mailbox that is physically outside NZ regardless of what relay we use. We would rather state this plainly than pretend otherwise.
Export your data any time, in open formats (CSV, OFX, PDF). Cancel any time with 30 days of post-cancellation data access. No contract, no minimum term, no data held hostage.
Every AI feature in RentManager is opt-in, runs locally or on our own NZ infrastructure where possible, and is described plainly. We do not prefill AI summaries into your tenant records. We do not analyse your rent ledger to predict risk. We do not sell training data to anyone.
We run the product we would want to use ourselves, built to the standards of the most privacy-protective jurisdiction in the world. If you care about any of that, welcome.