Terms of Service | Proximity

1. What Proximity is

Proximity is an off-campus housing marketplace for university students and the landlords who rent to them. We help students find listings near their campus, compare them, and get in touch with whoever is renting.

Proximity is a listing platform. We are not a party to any rental transaction. We are not a real-estate broker, a leasing agent, a property manager, a landlord, or a tenant screening service. We do not own, manage, inspect, or control any property listed on the Services. Any lease, sublease, application, deposit, or payment is strictly between you and the other person. Proximity is not involved and has no obligations under it.

2. Acceptance and eligibility

By creating a Proximity account, or by otherwise using the Services, you agree to these Terms and to our Privacy Policy. If you do not agree, do not use the Services.

To use the Services you must be at least 18 years old and able to enter into a binding contract. If you are using the Services on behalf of a company, partnership, or other organization (for example, as an employee of a property-management company), you represent that you have authority to bind that organization, and "you" means both you and it.

3. Your account

You can create an account with Google or with an email address and password. If you sign up with an email address and password, you must verify your email address before you can sign in.

You agree to:

give accurate information and keep it current;
keep your password and your device secure;
maintain one account per person; and
take responsibility for everything that happens under your account.

Tell us at info@useproximity.org if you believe someone else is using your account.

Accounts are created as either a student or a landlord account. Your account type determines what you can do: for example, only landlords can manage listings and see listing performance, and only students at a school we serve can leave reviews. We may change an account's type where it is clearly wrong or is being used to get around these Terms.

4. What Proximity does not do

This matters more here than on most platforms, so we want to be direct about it.

We do not verify listings. Rent, availability, photos, square footage, amenities, lease terms, and everything else on a listing come from the person who posted it or from the sources described in Section 7. We do not independently confirm any of it.
We do not verify landlords or students. We do not run background checks, credit checks, identity verification, or license checks on anyone.
We do not inspect properties. We have never visited most of the properties listed.
We do not screen or endorse. A listing appearing on Proximity (including one the matchmaking assistant recommends) is not a recommendation, endorsement, or judgment that the property or the person renting it is safe, legitimate, lawful, or suitable for you.
We are not involved in your money. We never collect rent, deposits, application fees, or any other payment between a student and a landlord, and we will never ask you to send one through us.

Use your own judgment. Visit the property, meet the person, read the lease, and be cautious with anyone who pressures you to pay or sign quickly, refuses to meet, or asks for money before you have seen the place.

5. Using Proximity as a student

You may browse and search listings, save the ones you like, contact the people renting them, use the matchmaking assistant and Lease Check, and leave reviews if you are eligible.

Sublease listings. If you are subletting your own place, you may post it as a listing. Everything in Section 6 about listing accuracy, your right to list, and non-discrimination applies to you exactly as it does to a landlord, including the requirement that you actually have the right to sublet under your own lease. Check your lease before you post.

6. Using Proximity as a landlord

If you post a listing, you represent and agree that:

You have the right to list the property and to rent it out.
Your listing is accurate and current. Rent, availability, unit details, lease terms, photos, and floor plans must reflect the property as it actually is. Take a listing down, or mark it unavailable, once it is no longer available.
Your photos are yours to use. You must own the photos and floor plans you upload or have permission to use them.
You comply with fair housing and rental law. You are solely responsible for complying with the federal Fair Housing Act, Missouri law, and any local ordinance that applies to you, including rules about advertising, discrimination, occupancy limits, disclosures, and licensing. You may not post a listing, or send a message through the Services, that discriminates on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, familial status, disability, or any other protected characteristic.

Your contact details are published. The contact name, email address, and phone number you put on a listing are displayed publicly on that listing so students can reach you. Do not put anything there you are not willing to make public.

Keeping listings fresh. Proximity may email you from time to time to ask whether a listing is still available, using a one-click link that does not require signing in. If a listing goes a long time without being confirmed, or if you tell us a property has been leased, we may automatically mark it unavailable so students are not shown stale listings. We never delete your listing when we do this, and marking it available again is always reversible.

Property-management system sync (optional). If you connect a supported property-management system, you authorize Proximity to read property, unit, pricing, and availability data from it in order to keep your listings current. The connection is read-only (we cannot change anything in your system), and your credentials are held by our integration provider, not by Proximity. You can disconnect at any time; your listings stay up after you do.

Co-owned listings. More than one landlord account can be attached to the same property. If you delete your account, a listing you share with another owner stays live under them, and your published contact details on it are replaced with theirs. See Section 17.

7. Listings we compile from public sources

Not every listing on Proximity was posted by an account holder. We also compile listings for off-campus properties from publicly available sources, including the contact details a property already advertises publicly.

If your property appears on Proximity this way:

It does not mean you use Proximity or have agreed to these Terms. An unclaimed listing creates no agreement between us.
You can claim it. Create a landlord account and email info@useproximity.org, and we will connect the listing to your account so you control it.
You can have it removed. Email info@useproximity.org and we will remove the listing. You do not need an account to ask, and you do not need to give a reason.

We aim to act on claim and removal requests promptly.

8. Reviews

Reviews are what make Proximity useful, and they are also the part most open to abuse.

Who can review. Only students with a verified email address at a school we serve can leave reviews. We may limit how many reviews an account can post, and we may remove reviews that exceed a limit we have applied.

What a review must be. A review must describe your own first-hand experience of living at, or dealing with, the property or landlord in question. You may not post a review in exchange for anything, post about a property you have never dealt with, review your own property, or ask anyone else to do any of those things.

Anonymity. You can post a review anonymously. When you do, we do not store a display name against it, and your name is not shown. Anonymity is from other users, not from us: your account is still linked to the review internally until your account is deleted.

Moderation. Reviews are subject to review before or after they appear, and we may hold, hide, or remove any review that we believe is fake, incentivized, harassing, defamatory, discriminatory, off-topic, or otherwise in breach of these Terms. We are not obligated to host any particular review, and removing one is not an endorsement of the property.

Landlord replies. Landlords may reply publicly to reviews of their listings. A reply is subject to the same rules as a review, and may not identify a reviewer who posted anonymously or retaliate against them.

Reviews outlive accounts. If you delete your account, your reviews stay on Proximity in anonymized form: your name and the link to your account are removed, and the text remains because it describes a property, not you. See Section 17 and Privacy Policy §8.

9. The matchmaking assistant

The matchmaking assistant asks about your budget, timing, group, and priorities, and then suggests listings. It is available on the website and in the mobile apps.

It is AI-generated and it can be wrong. Suggestions, rankings, summaries, and the reasons it gives may be inaccurate, incomplete, or out of date. Check anything that matters against the listing itself and with the person renting it.
It is a suggestion, not advice. It is not housing, financial, or legal advice, and a recommendation is not an endorsement (see Section 4).
Some listings are filtered. Where a listing states that occupancy is restricted to tenants of one gender, the assistant will not recommend it unless the gender on your profile matches. This affects only what the assistant suggests. It never limits what you can search, browse, view, or contact directly.
Your first name is sent to our AI provider so the assistant can address you naturally, along with your conversation and preferences. Privacy Policy §4 explains this in full.

10. Lease Check

Lease Check is currently available on the website only. You upload a lease and an AI model returns a plain-language summary and a list of things worth asking about.

Lease Check is not legal advice, and Proximity is not a law firm. No attorney-client relationship is created by using it. The analysis is generated by an AI model, it makes mistakes, and it may miss something important or flag something that is fine. Do not rely on it as your only review of a lease. If something matters, talk to a lawyer or your university's student legal services office before you sign.

The lease file you upload is deleted from our storage as soon as the analysis finishes; we keep only the output. See Privacy Policy §1.7 for exactly what is and is not retained.

11. Contacting landlords

When you send an inquiry through a listing, Proximity delivers it by email to the person renting that property. Your name, email address, phone number if you gave one, and your message go to them, and your email address is set as the reply-to so they can respond to you directly. We send you a confirmation copy.

We do not guarantee that anyone will reply, that a listing is still available, or that the recipient is who they say they are. Once your message is delivered, it is in their inbox and outside our control: we cannot recall it, including if you later delete your account.

12. Acceptable use

You agree not to:

post anything false, misleading, fraudulent, or that you do not have the right to post;
list a property you have no right to rent or sublet;
post a discriminatory listing or send a discriminatory message;
write, solicit, buy, sell, or coordinate fake, incentivized, or retaliatory reviews, or create additional accounts to leave more reviews than these Terms allow;
impersonate anyone, or misrepresent your affiliation with a school, company, or property;
harvest, scrape, or bulk-collect listings, contact details, or other content from the Services, by any automated means or otherwise;
work around rate limits, access controls, authentication, or any other technical measure, or access parts of the Services you are not authorized to reach;
use the Services to send spam or unsolicited commercial messages;
harass, threaten, stalk, or endanger anyone;
upload malware, or interfere with or overload the Services; or
use the Services for anything unlawful, or to help anyone else do any of the above.

13. Your content

You keep what you own. Listings, photos, floor plans, reviews, replies, profile details, and anything else you submit ("Your Content") remain yours.

The licence you give us. You grant Proximity a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to host, store, reproduce, adapt for display, publish, and distribute Your Content in order to operate, improve, and promote the Services. For anything you post publicly (listings and reviews), this licence continues after you delete your account to the extent the content remains published under Section 8 or Section 17.

What you promise. You represent that you own Your Content or have the rights to submit it, and that it does not infringe anyone else's rights or break any law.

What we may do. We may remove or refuse any content at our discretion, but we are not obligated to monitor content and we are not responsible for content posted by users.

14. Copyright complaints

If you believe content on Proximity infringes your copyright, email info@useproximity.org with:

your contact details;
identification of the work you say is infringed;
the URL or enough detail for us to find the content;
a statement that you believe in good faith the use is not authorized;
a statement, under penalty of perjury, that your notice is accurate and that you are the rights holder or authorized to act for them; and
your physical or electronic signature.

We will investigate and remove infringing content where appropriate, and we may disable the accounts of repeat infringers.

15. Our intellectual property

The Services (including the Proximity name and logo, the website and apps, their design, and the software behind them) belong to Proximity LLC and are protected by intellectual property law. These Terms give you permission to use the Services, and nothing more. You may not copy, modify, reverse-engineer, resell, or create derivative works from the Services, or use our name or logo without our written permission.

16. Third-party services

The Services rely on third parties, including Google for sign-in and maps imagery, Mapbox for maps and travel times, our AI provider for the features in Sections 9 and 10, and property-management providers for the sync in Section 6. Listings may also link to third-party websites. We do not control any of them, we are not responsible for them, and your use of them may be governed by their own terms. Privacy Policy §6.3 lists the providers who handle personal information.

17. Suspension, termination, and deleting your account

You can leave at any time. Account deletion is self-service on the website, from your dashboard. When you confirm, your account stops working immediately, listings you owned alone are withdrawn from the marketplace, listings you co-owned stay live under the co-owner, and your personal data is permanently erased after 30 days. There is no undo. Privacy Policy §8 sets out exactly what is erased, what is anonymized, and what is kept.

We can suspend or terminate. We may suspend or terminate your account, remove your content, or withdraw a listing if we believe you have breached these Terms, if it is necessary to protect other users or Proximity, or if required by law. Where it is reasonable to do so, we will tell you why. If we terminate your account, the same erasure timetable applies as if you had deleted it yourself, except where Section 17A permits us to keep something for longer.

Inactive accounts. We do not currently close an account for inactivity, and an account you stop using is kept until you delete it. If we introduce a dormancy period, we will give you notice by email before it takes effect and a chance to keep the account open.

What survives. Sections 8 (reviews staying published in anonymized form), 13 (the licence, to the extent content remains published), 15, 17A, 18, 19, 20, and 22 survive the end of your account.

17A. Data, retention, and deletion

Retention. How long we keep each kind of information, and what happens to it when you leave, are set out in Privacy Policy §§8 and 9. We may change those periods; where a change materially shortens or lengthens how long we hold your personal data, we will update the Privacy Policy and, for material changes, notify registered users as §12 of that policy requires.

When we may keep something longer. Despite the erasure timetable, we may retain what we reasonably need to: resolve or defend a dispute involving you; investigate or prevent fraud, abuse, or a security incident; enforce these Terms; or comply with a legal obligation, court order, or lawful request. We keep only what is necessary for that purpose, for only as long as the purpose lasts, and we do not use it for anything else. When it ends, the data is erased.

Backups. We take encrypted backups so we can recover from a failure. A backup is a snapshot, so information you delete can remain in one until that backup expires. We do not restore a backup in order to bring back deleted data.

Aggregated and de-identified information. We may create aggregated or de-identified information from activity on the Services, such as how many people viewed a listing or how prices move across a neighborhood, and we may keep and use it indefinitely, including after your account is gone. This information does not identify you and we do not attempt to re-identify it.

Withdrawn listings. A listing that is withdrawn stops being published but is retained as marketplace history. When a listing is withdrawn because its only owner deleted their account, that owner's name, email address, and phone number are removed from it.

People without an account. We hold limited information about some people who never signed up, described in Privacy Policy §1.8, and they can have it deleted on request even though these Terms do not apply to them.

Copies of your data. You can ask for a copy of the personal information we hold about you at any time. Privacy Policy §10 explains how.

Our service providers. Privacy Policy §6.3 lists the providers who process personal information for us. We remain responsible for their handling of it, and we will update that list when it changes.

18. Disclaimers

The Services are provided "as is" and "as available," without warranties of any kind, express or implied. To the fullest extent permitted by law, Proximity disclaims all implied warranties, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, and non-infringement.

We make no warranty about listings or people. We do not warrant that any listing is accurate, current, available, lawfully advertised, or that any property is safe, habitable, or as described; or that any landlord, student, or other user is who they claim to be or will behave lawfully or honestly. We do not warrant that the Services will be uninterrupted, secure, or error-free, or that AI-generated output will be accurate.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties, so parts of this section may not apply to you.

19. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, Proximity will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost data, loss of goodwill, or the cost of substitute housing, arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Services, whether based in contract, tort, or any other theory, and even if we have been advised of the possibility.

In particular, and without limiting Section 18, Proximity is not liable for: any lease, sublease, or rental arrangement you enter into; the conduct, acts, or omissions of any landlord, student, or other user, whether online or in person; the condition, safety, legality, or availability of any property; any payment you make to another user; or any decision you make in reliance on the matchmaking assistant or Lease Check.

Our total liability to you for all claims relating to the Services will not exceed $100 USD.

Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits liability that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited, including liability for fraud, or for death or personal injury caused by our negligence. Some jurisdictions do not allow certain limitations, so parts of this section may not apply to you.

20. Indemnification

You agree to indemnify and hold harmless Proximity LLC and its members, officers, and employees from any claim, demand, loss, liability, or expense (including reasonable legal fees) arising out of your use of the Services, Your Content, your breach of these Terms, or your violation of any law or of anyone else's rights, including any claim brought by a student or landlord you dealt with through Proximity.

21. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms. When we do, we will revise the "Last updated" date above. If the changes are material, we will notify registered users by email and by an in-app notice before they take effect. Continuing to use the Services after an update takes effect means you accept the revised Terms. If you do not accept them, stop using the Services and delete your account.

22. Governing law and disputes

These Terms, and any dispute arising out of or relating to them or the Services, are governed by the laws of the State of Missouri, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules.

You and Proximity agree that any such dispute will be brought exclusively in the state or federal courts located in St. Louis County, Missouri, and both of us consent to the personal jurisdiction of those courts.

Before filing anything, please email us at info@useproximity.org. Most problems are faster to fix directly.

23. General

Entire agreement. These Terms and the Privacy Policy are the entire agreement between you and Proximity about the Services, and replace any earlier understanding.

Severability. If any provision is found unenforceable, the rest stays in force and the unenforceable provision is applied to the maximum extent permitted.

No waiver. If we do not enforce a provision, that is not a waiver of our right to enforce it later.

Assignment. You may not assign these Terms without our written consent. We may assign them in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets.

No agency. Nothing in these Terms creates a partnership, joint venture, employment, or agency relationship between you and Proximity.

24. Contact us

Proximity LLC 70 Greendale Rd, Scarsdale, NY 10583-2133 info@useproximity.org