Cookies at homehogs
Last updated 4 October 2026
This page lists every cookie homehogs uses, by name, with what each one does and how long it lives. It is a short list. We would like it to stay that way.
homehogs is a service of Homehogs Ltd, registered in England and Wales under company number 17353377, whose registered office is 71-75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London, WC2H 9JQ, United Kingdom. We are registered with the Information Commissioner's Office under registration ZC222992. This page covers cookies only; the wider story of what we hold and why is told in our privacy notice.
What a cookie is
A cookie is a small piece of text a website asks your browser to keep and hand back on later visits. It is how a site remembers you between pages: that you are signed in, which country you are in, what you answered last time. A cookie cannot run anything on your device and cannot read anything else on it.
How we use them
Nearly all our cookies are the working kind. They keep you signed in, keep forms secure and remember choices you have made. The service does not work without them, so they cannot be switched off individually, and all of them belong to our own site and can be read by nobody else.
The exceptions are the two measurement choices we offer on our public website: counting page views, and seeing which of our adverts brought people here. Both are entirely your choice, both are off until you say yes, and each is asked separately, so agreeing to one is never agreeing to the other. They have their own sections below.
Nothing you do inside your account is tracked, measured or profiled. Neither of those two choices runs there at all: they exist on the public pages, the ones anybody can read without signing in, and nowhere else. Apart from them, nobody but us sets cookies on our pages.
The cookies the service needs
These are the essential ones. Which of them you actually meet depends on what you do: somebody reading a guide picks up one or two, a member signing in collects the account ones.
| Cookie | What it does | How long it lasts |
|---|---|---|
.AspNetCore. |
Keeps you signed in as you move between pages. | Until you close your browser, or two weeks if you ticked "Remember me" |
.AspNetCore. |
Carries you from entering your password to entering your sign-in code, so we know the two belong to the same sign-in. | A few minutes |
.AspNetCore. |
Remembers a device you asked us to trust, so it is not asked for a sign-in code every time. | Two weeks |
.AspNetCore. |
Set while you sign in with Google, Apple, Microsoft or Facebook so the answer that comes back can be matched to the sign-in that asked for it. The full name ends in the provider and a random string. | About 15 minutes |
.AspNetCore. |
Carries the provider's answer from the sign-in callback to the page that finishes signing you in. | A few minutes |
.AspNetCore. |
Proves that a form you send really came from a homehogs page, which protects your account from forged submissions. The full name ends in a string of letters. | Until you close your browser |
Identity. |
Carries a one-line confirmation, "password changed" for example, across a page change. | A few seconds |
hc-geo |
Remembers which country's version of homehogs to show you, so the lookup runs once rather than on every page. | 30 days, or 90 days when you confirm your country yourself |
hc-analytics |
Remembers your answer to the page-view question below, so you are not asked on every visit. It holds the word granted or the word denied and nothing else. | One year |
hc-ads |
Remembers your answer to the advert-measurement question below, kept apart from the one above because they are two separate questions. It holds the word granted or the word denied and nothing else. | One year |
hc-lead-retry |
If you ask for one of our free guides and the form has to send you back, after a typo or a failed robot check, this carries what you had typed so the form returns filled in. It is encrypted and deleted the moment it has been read. | Ten minutes |
hc-logbook-… |
Appears only if somebody shares a property logbook with you that needs an emailed code: it remembers that this browser entered the code correctly. The number on the end names the share it belongs to. | Twelve hours |
ARRAffinity, ARRAffinitySameSite |
Set by Microsoft Azure, which hosts homehogs, so that your requests keep reaching the same server while you use the site. | Until you close your browser |
Counting page views, only if you say yes
On our public website, this page and the pages around it, we use Google Analytics to count page views and see which guides people find useful. It never runs inside your account. We ask first, nothing is stored until you say yes and you can change your answer whenever you like using the button below.
If you say no, or say nothing, no analytics cookies are set: the only
thing kept is your answer, in the hc-analytics cookie
above, so we do not ask again. If you say yes, Google Analytics sets
these two:
| Cookie | What it does | How long it lasts |
|---|---|---|
_ga |
Tells returning visitors apart by giving your browser a randomly generated number. It does not know who you are. | About 13 months |
_ga_… |
Counts the pages you view and holds them together as one visit. The name ends in a code identifying our site. | About 13 months |
Counting page views is kept separate from measuring adverts, below: saying yes to this one does not switch that one on. If you say no, or say nothing, we fetch nothing from Google at all, so Google is not told that you were here.
Measuring our adverts, only if you say yes
We pay to advertise homehogs on Google. If you say yes to this second question and you go on to do something on our public website that we advertised, such as creating an account, we record that it happened so we can tell which adverts are worth paying for. What Google is told is that it happened, along with a reference number that stops the same one being counted twice. Your email address is never part of it and neither is anything else you typed.
We do not use it to follow you around the internet. The Google setting that would let these visits be turned into advertising audiences, advertising personalisation, is switched off permanently, so you will not start seeing homehogs adverts elsewhere because of it. Like the analytics above, it never runs inside your account, and if you say no or say nothing, nothing is fetched from Google and nothing is sent. If you say yes, Google sets these:
| Cookie | What it does | How long it lasts |
|---|---|---|
_gcl_au |
Holds a randomly generated number so that a visit and something you later do on the site can be recognised as the same visit. It does not know who you are. | 90 days |
_gcl_aw, _gcl_dc, _gcl_gs |
Appear only if you arrived by clicking one of our adverts, and hold the reference Google put on that click so the advert can be credited. Which of them you get depends on where the advert was shown. | 90 days |
Google may also set or read cookies of its own, on google.com and doubleclick.net, at the moment a conversion is reported. Google acts on its own account for that rather than ours, and its own privacy policy covers it. There is more on all of this in our privacy notice.
What you will not find
Nothing that follows you off this website. The advert measurement above counts what happened here; it does not build an audience, and no cookie of ours is used to show you adverts anywhere else. There are no social media buttons quietly reporting your visit, and nothing at all runs inside your account. A few of our forms use Cloudflare's "confirm you are human" check, which runs in a small frame of Cloudflare's own rather than on our pages; what Cloudflare processes is described in our privacy notice.
One more script belongs to somebody else: a small loader from Trustpilot, on our public pages only. It is there so that Trustpilot can confirm homehogs.com is ours, which it does by looking for it. It sets no cookies, stores nothing on your device and sends nothing about you; the only thing it fetches is itself. If we ever invite you to leave a review, that happens by email and is described in our privacy notice.
Managing cookies in your browser
Your browser can show, block and delete cookies whenever you like; its help pages explain where the controls live. You are welcome to clear ours at any time. Worth knowing before you do: without the essential ones you will be signed out, forms will refuse to send and the site will ask about your country again.
Changes and questions
If a cookie is added, changed or retired, this page and the date at the top change with it. If you have a question, message us from the support page or reply to any email homehogs has sent you. If you are unhappy with how we have handled your data, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.