Referral Partner Terms

1. Who these terms are for

These terms apply between Party Wall Online ("we", "us") and you, as a referral partner, from the moment we issue your referral link. They sit alongside our Terms of Business, which govern the work we do for any client you refer.

You do not need to be a professional to be a partner, but if you are, you remain responsible for your own regulator's rules on referral fees. See section 8.

If anything here does not work for you, email hello@partywallonline.co.uk before you make a referral and we will agree something in writing.

2. What we pay

We pay a fixed referral fee per completed case, based on how the neighbours responded to the party wall notice:

• £75 where any adjoining owner dissents, or fails to respond within the statutory 14 days (which the Act treats as a dissent), and we go on to serve a Party Wall Award • £0 where every adjoining owner consents, so no Award is needed

The fee is per case, not per notice or per neighbour. A case with four dissenting neighbours pays £75, the same as a case with one.

There is no cap and no minimum. The fee is inclusive of VAT where you are VAT registered, so if you charge VAT you should treat £75 as the VAT-inclusive total. If we have agreed a different rate with you in writing, that rate applies instead of the published one.

3. When a referral becomes payable

A referral becomes payable when all three of the following are true:

• The client instructed us, and the case is attributed to you (see section 4) • The case has been closed on our system, meaning the Award has been served or the matter otherwise concluded • The client has paid our fees in full

A referral that is cancelled, refunded, charged back, or where our fees go unpaid, does not qualify. If we pay a fee and the client later charges back or we have to refund in full, we may set that fee off against your next payment. We will tell you when we do.

We do not pay a referral fee where you refer yourself, your own company, a company under your control, or a property you own or have an interest in.

4. Your referral link, and how tracking works

When you join we issue you a personal referral link, in the form https://partywallonline.co.uk/quote?ref=YOUR-CODE. Your link is the only thing that tracks a referral automatically.

When someone opens our quote page through your link, we store your code in their browser for 30 days. If they get a quote and instruct us within that window, the case is stamped with your code and the fee is created automatically when the case completes. You can see every referral and every fee, live, in your partner portal at partywallonline.co.uk/partners.

Tracking is not magic and it does not read minds. It will miss a referral if your client types our address in manually, finds us through a search instead of your link, uses a different device from the one that opened your link, or takes longer than 30 days to instruct.

So: if you are recommending us in an email, copy hello@partywallonline.co.uk into it. We will log the referral by hand against your account. Please copy us in openly using CC rather than BCC, so that your client can see you have introduced them to us. If you would rather not copy your client's email to us, just send us their name and the property address and we will match it up.

Either way, tell us before or at the time you refer. We cannot fairly credit a referral you tell us about after the client has already instructed us through some other route, because by then we have no way to know who sent them.

If you think a case should have been credited to you and it was not, email us within 60 days of the instruction and we will look at it. Where the evidence is genuinely unclear, we will decide in good faith, and our decision is final.

5. When and how we pay

We pay on the first working day of each calendar month, covering every referral that became payable during the previous calendar month. Where the first falls on a weekend or a bank holiday, payment runs on the next working day.

Payment is by BACS to the account you give us. We cannot pay you until you have given us your bank details and, where relevant, your VAT number.

Around the same time we send you a statement listing each case and fee in the run. Please check it. If you think a statement is wrong, tell us within 30 days of the date we send it, and we will correct anything we got wrong in the next run.

Referral fees are yours gross. You are responsible for declaring them and for any income tax, National Insurance, corporation tax or VAT due on them. We do not deduct tax at source.

6. What we ask of you

Please:

• Only refer people who actually want a party wall surveyor, and who know you are passing their details on • Describe our service accurately, and quote our published prices rather than inventing your own • Leave the party wall advice to us. Do not hold yourself out as able to advise on the Act on our behalf, and do not tell a client what their notice or Award will say • Keep it clean: no unsolicited bulk email or texts, no fake reviews, no bidding on "Party Wall Online" or close variants of it in paid search, and no signing anyone up without their knowledge

We reserve the right to decline any referral, and to withhold a fee where a referral breaches this section. We will always tell you why.

7. You are not our agent

Being a referral partner does not make you our employee, agent, partner or joint venturer, and it does not give you authority to enter into contracts, make promises, or accept instructions on our behalf. You cannot bind us to anything.

Our contract for the party wall work is with the client, not with you. We owe our professional duties to the parties under the Party Wall etc. Act 1996 and, once appointed, we act impartially as required by the Act. Nothing in this arrangement affects that, and a referral fee never buys influence over how we handle a case or what an Award says.

8. Telling your client about the fee

You should tell your client that you receive a fee for referring them to us. If you are a member of a professional body, or regulated by one, this is very likely a requirement rather than a courtesy. RICS, RIBA, ARB, the SRA and CLC all expect referral arrangements to be disclosed to the client, and several require it in writing before the client instructs.

Checking your own regulator's position is your responsibility, not ours, but we are happy to give you the wording we use. For our part, we disclose to clients that we operate a referral partner programme and pay referral fees.

9. Personal data

When you pass us a client's details, you and we are each acting as an independent controller of that data under the UK GDPR. Neither of us processes it on the other's behalf.

Before you refer someone, please make sure you have a lawful basis to pass their details to us, and that they know you are doing it. In practice that means asking them, or telling them, that you are introducing them to a party wall surveyor. This is why we ask you to CC us rather than BCC us.

Only send us what we need: name, contact details, the property address and the works proposed. Do not send us special category data.

Once we have a client's details we handle them as controller, under our Privacy Policy, and we will contact the client about their party wall matter. We do not add referred clients to marketing lists on the strength of a referral alone.

10. Ending the arrangement, and changes

Either of us may end this arrangement at any time, by email, with no notice period and no reason needed.

If it ends, we still pay you for every referral already attributed to you that goes on to become payable, on the normal monthly cycle. Your link stops working from the date we tell you, and referrals made after that date do not qualify.

We may change these terms, including the fee rates, by giving you 30 days' notice by email. Changes are not retrospective: any case already attributed to you before the change takes effect is paid at the old rate.

We may suspend or end the arrangement immediately, and withhold unpaid fees, where we reasonably believe you have breached section 6 or acted dishonestly.

11. Liability and governing law

Neither of us is liable to the other for loss of profit, loss of opportunity or any indirect or consequential loss arising out of this arrangement. Our total liability to you is limited to the referral fees payable to you in the twelve months before the claim. Nothing here limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud.

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction.