Privacy notice

What the pre-approval form collects

• Who is on the loan: your full legal name, and a co-borrower name if you add one.
• How to reach you: your phone number, your email if you give it, and how you prefer to be reached if you say.
• The home: the kind of home, the state and county, when you plan to buy, how the home will be used and whether everyone on the loan will live there, the price you are aiming for, and when you need your letter if you say.
• Work and income: how you are paid, how long you have been with your employer, whether your hours or hourly pay vary, whether you have worked steadily for two years, more than one job, commission, rental income or income paid from outside the United States, your base pay (per month or per year, as you enter it), and any overtime or bonus.
• Residency: whether you are a U.S. citizen or permanent resident.
• Credit and debts: your monthly debt payments, how you would describe your credit, and whether you have had a bankruptcy, foreclosure or short sale in the last seven years.
• Down payment: how much you have, whether any of it is a gift, whether you know where all of it is coming from, and whether you expect large deposits you cannot document yet.

When you send the form, the site also records the result (a letter, or a note that Zach will talk it through with you), the letter ID and the letter itself if one is issued, and the times these happened.

It never asks for a Social Security number, date of birth, account numbers, documents or uploads, or the address of a home. If you choose a kind of home Zach does not arrange loans for, the form stops there and nothing is stored.

Why it is collected

• To prepare your pre-approval estimate and letter.
• To contact you about your request.
• To meet legal and regulatory duties.

The form itself does not pull your credit. When Zach follows up to verify a pre-approval, he uses a soft credit check, which you authorize when you send the form.

Who sees it

• Zach von der Linden, who reviews your request and follows up with you.
• West Capital Lending, the licensed company Zach works through, for supervision, recordkeeping and required reporting.
• Service providers that run the site for Zach: Cloudflare hosts the site and stores your request, the letter and the site counter, and delivers the email that tells Zach about your request. The email goes to his West Capital Lending mailbox.
• If you later apply for a loan, your application goes to the lender Zach places your loan with, under the notices you receive when you apply.

This site does not sell or share personal information. No advertising scripts run on it, and the one third-party script, Cloudflare Web Analytics, is cookieless and does not track individuals. Nothing you type is sent to advertisers.

Other ways you reach Zach

• The short “Want me to reach out?” form asks for your name, your phone, what your question is about, when to reach you and, if you want to say, how you found Zach. It is saved and emailed to Zach, and he texts or calls you back. It does not pull your credit.
• No cookies and no tracking pixels. The site uses Cloudflare Web Analytics, which is cookieless and does not track individuals, to count page views and where visits came from. The site's own server also counts page views, clicks on the main buttons, the steps of the short “Want me to reach out?” form (started, sent, a required answer missing, received, with nothing you type) and the steps of the pre-approval form (started, sent, letter issued, passed to Zach, letter downloaded, with none of your answers), and it records only the kind of event, the page address without anything after a question mark, where on the page the button sat, the domain of the site that linked here if there was one, the campaign tag in the link if any, the country Cloudflare reports for the request, whether the screen was phone, tablet or desktop size, and the time. It stores no IP address, no browser details, no identifier of any kind and nothing you type. We count clicks on our contact buttons, along with approximate city and region and the referring site, and we don't store IP addresses. Your browser also keeps a note of how you first found the site (the referring site or campaign tag) for up to 30 days, so a later contact click can be credited to the right source; no personal information is stored. If you open any page with ?me=1 in the address, your browser stores one local flag that means “leave me out,” and its visits are not counted; ?me=0 removes it. The flag is not an identifier and is never sent anywhere.
• The “See my HELOC options” button opens West Capital Lending’s site, where its privacy policy applies.

How long it is kept

• Pre-approval request records (your answers, the result and the letter record): 25 months.
• The decision audit record, and the original of any letter that is later voided: 25 months.
• Letter download links stop working after 120 days. The stored copy of the letter stays with the request record for its 25 months.
• Requests that go to Zach without a letter, and requests that are not a fit: 25 months.

Seeing, correcting or deleting your information

To ask what is held about you, to correct it, or to ask for it to be deleted, text or call Zach at (949) 537-1260 or email zachv@westcapitallending.com.

Some records must be kept to meet legal duties, so a deletion request may not remove everything.

California notice at collection

If you live in California, this is what the pre-approval form collects, why, and how long it is kept.