Privacy Policy

Last updated: September 1, 2006

AvatarFinancial.com knows that you care how information about you is used and shared, and we appreciate your trust that we will do so carefully and sensibly. This notice describes our privacy policy. By visiting AvatarFinancial.com, you are accepting the practices described in this Privacy Notice.

What Personal Information About Customers Does AvatarFinancial.com Gather?
The information we learn from customers helps us personalize and continually improve your experience at AvatarFinancial.com. Here are the types of information we gather.

• Information You Give Us: We receive and store any information you enter on our Web site or give us in any other way. We use the information that you provide to respond to your requests and communicate with you.

• Automatic Information: We receive and store certain types of information whenever you interact with us. For example, like many Web sites, we use "cookies," and we obtain certain types of information when your Web browser accesses AvatarFinancial.com. We use this information in bulk only and do not track the origins of individual visitors. We use this information to help us disseminate information about AvatarFinancial.com

• E-mail Communications: For Preferred Brokers only: to help us make e-mails more useful to you, we may receive a confirmation when you open e-mail from AvatarFinancial.com if your computer supports such capabilities. If you do not want to receive e-mail or other mail from us, please adjust contact us.

What About Cookies?

• Cookies are alphanumeric identifiers that we transfer to your computer's hard drive through your Web browser to enable our systems to recognize your browser and to provide personalized features and storage of items in your Shopping Cart between visits.

• The Help portion of the toolbar on most browsers will tell you how to prevent your browser from accepting new cookies, how to have the browser notify you when you receive a new cookie, or how to disable cookies altogether.

Does AvatarFinancial.com Share the Information it Receives?

• Information about our customers is an important part of our business, and we are not in the business of selling it to others. We share customer information only as described below and with subsidiaries of our parent companies.

• Agents: We employ other companies and individuals to perform functions on our behalf. Examples include sending postal mail and e-mail to our Preferred Brokers, removing repetitive information from lists, analyzing data, providing marketing assistance, providing search results and links (including paid listings and links). They have access to information needed to perform their functions, but may not use it for any other purposes.

• Protection of AvatarFinancial.com and Others: We release account and other personal information only when we believe release is appropriate to comply with the law; enforce or apply our Conditions of Use and other agreements; or protect the rights, property, or safety of AvatarFinancial.com, our users, or others. This includes sharing information when requested through legal channels with local, state and national government and enforcement agencies.

How Secure is Information About me?

• Your information is sent via secured channels to a secure database. No one can access this database except employees and contractors of Avatar Financial. If you wish to have your information removed from the database after we have read it, please let us know.

What Choices Do I Have?

• As discussed above, you can always choose not to provide information.

• If you do not want to receive e-mail or other mail from us, please adjust your Customer Preferences. (If you do not want to receive Conditions of Use and other legal notices from us, such as this Privacy Notice, those notices will still govern your use of AvatarFinancial.com, and it is your responsibility to review them for changes.)

• The Help portion of the toolbar on most browsers will tell you how to prevent your browser from accepting new cookies, how to have the browser notify you when you receive a new cookie, or how to disable cookies altogether. However, you will not be able to use many important features if you do.

Automatic Information
Examples of the information we collect and analyze include the Internet protocol (IP) address used to connect your computer to the Internet; login; e-mail address; password; computer and connection information such as browser type and version, operating system, and platform; purchase history, which we sometimes aggregate with similar information from other customers to improve our site; the full Uniform Resource Locator (URL) clickstream to, through, and from our Web site, including date and time; cookie number; products you viewed or searched for; and the phone number you used to call our toll-free number. During some visits we may use software tools such as JavaScript to measure and collect session information, including page response times, download errors, length of visits to certain pages, page interaction information (such as scrolling, clicks, and mouse-overs), and methods used to browse away from the page.

Information from Other Sources
Examples of information we receive from other sources include updated delivery and address information from our carriers or other third parties, which we use to correct our records and deliver your next purchase or communication more easily; account information, purchase or redemption information, and page-view information; search term and search result information from some searches conducted through the Web search features, search results, and links, including paid listings (such as Sponsored Links from Google).

Information You Can Access
Examples of information you can access easily at AvatarFinancial.com include up-to-date information regarding recent closings and information about our company and industry-specific information for brokers and borrowers concerning hard money, hard money commercial lenders, hard money lending, bridge loans, and more.