They’re baaaaaack!
The ever-annoying, constantly disrupting cyberattack bullies hit again in a big way at the end of summer. This time, the target was Southern California-based Rapattoni Corp., one of the nation’s leading real estate software providers, whose multi-listing service (MLS) is used extensively throughout the North Bay by brokers, real estate agents, appraisers, mortgage companies and just about anyone associated with the housing market.
Hackers infiltrated Rapattoni’s system late on Tuesday, Aug. 8, affecting tens of thousands of agents in markets of all sizes in 12 states. Agents were unable to list open houses, enter new listings, change prices, edit existing listings, report final sales/pending sales or provide showing instructions. In short, everything linked to Rapattoni virtually ground to a halt.
Third-party online listing services, such as Zillow and Redfin, were also impacted since they depend on Rapattoni and other MLS services for their data.
The outage—from which Rapattoni has gradually been recovering (as of this writing many photos entered by agents prior to the hack still have not come back online)—was a siren call, once again highlighting the danger of overdependence on technology.
But surprisingly it was also an opportunity, according to several North Bay real estate agents. Seeking innovative ways to keep on selling while Rapattoni righted its ship, agents throughout the North Bay—and nationwide for that matter—found unity in an old-fashioned idea.
They got back to basics.
Picking up the phone
“It [the outage] wasn’t bad for a few reasons,” says Matt Sevenau, an agent with Compass of Sonoma. “We just got back to basics. Instead of totally relying on new data coming in for new listings to help our buyers, we just started calling agents, finding out who had what and reminding agents of what we had.”
“We resorted to good old-fashioned phone calls,” notes Roberta Jones-Quinn, an agent with Luxe Places International Realty in Healdsburg. “We survived before [the advent of online MLS] and we just figured it out.”
“We actually answered our phones!” exclaims Allison Norman, agent with Keller Williams Realty in Santa Rosa and host of a weekly
Sunday radio show about real estate on KSRO. “Half the time I don’t answer my phone because of spam,” she explains. But during the crisis she made a point to answer calls because “more agents were calling.”
Good old days
The outage took many seasoned real estate veterans back to the good old days before MLS was automated and online. Jill Silvas, sales manager for Compass Realty in Sonoma, has been in the real estate business for more than 30 years.
Without revealing just how long she’s been around, she notes that, “When you get your real estate license, they give you a number and people whose number starts with 00 have been in the business a really long time. My number begins with 00,” she laughs.
She started her career when she was in community college, “before there were MLS books.” She worked for an agency where her job was to file small, index-card-sized pieces of paper that arrived at the office promptly every morning. “Each piece of paper contained information about a new listing or a price reduction or changes to showing instructions. I had to file the cards and put in new listings and pull out the old listings.” She went off to finish college at a four-year institution and when she came back to the business after graduation, MLS had started publishing weekly books of properties for sale.
“Once a week the books would arrive at the office,” she remembers. “The books were not to be given to clients, but we all did because that’s how the clients decided what to look at. During the week, we’d get updates and we’d make notes in the books.” No such thing as going online to do it—because personal computers and the Internet were way in the future.
Silvas laughs when she recounts how her broker bought one of the very first fax machines. “It was very forward thinking,” she says, “but we didn’t know who we were going to fax anything to because no one else had a fax machine.”
There was no FedEx or overnight mailing. “Everything was done in person,” she says. “You sat with clients and reviewed the documents and signed them in person.” She remembers the old NCR (no carbon required) contracts—“which were much shorter back then,” she notes—with yellow, pink, light blue and white pages. “You had to press really hard to make sure the signature went through to all four pages.”
When overnight mail finally debuted in the early 1970s, Silvas was “absolutely convinced it wouldn’t take off. I couldn’t figure out how they could get documents from California to Dallas or New York overnight.” Now it’s the norm.
The business back then was “very personal,” she says.
“When you presented an offer, you went to the agent or the agent and seller if you were the buyer’s agent,” she remembers. “You told them who the buyer was, where the money was coming from, etc.” Today, sharing such information is almost verboten—the only information shared is the buyer’s financial ability to buy the house. All other personal information about the buyer is not revealed.
While the advent of technology has made the real estate business more streamlined, Silvas says it has also led to a “constant battle to retain the high touch between the agent and the client.”
“We do so much by email, texting and the phone. How many times do we really sit down with a seller or buyer and go through the documents to really explain the details?” she asks. “But in reality, today most clients don’t want that,” preferring things to be more transactional.
Today, things move much faster, reflective of society as a whole. Silvas recalls that she recently assisted another Compass agent who was out of town and who asked that she sit down with clients that were first-time buyers.
“It took two hours!” she exclaimed.
Alternative outreach
For North Bay agents, answering the phone and making personal connections wasn’t the only workaround to the Rapattoni hack.
Bob Pennypacker, agent with Sotheby’s Realty in Sonoma, sent direct emails to other agents and his own personal contacts, a tactic he’s used for years.
Norman advertised in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, a somewhat radical departure from the norm in today’s world of electronic media, versus print. “We were having to go old school to get out there,” she reflects. She also beefed up her Facebook ads and followed the same approach as Pennypacker, emailing clients, potential clients and other agents.
She used Zenlist, a San Francisco-based real estate platform that currently operates in 20 MLS markets across the nation, including the Bay Area. Zenlist is a mobile app to help agents collaborate with clients and each other. It offers property searches through MLS connections and off-market resources, as well as some aspects of customer-relationship management for agents. Agents invite buyers to use the app and clients can search by features or with a map, save properties and chat with agents. Zenlist, since its introduction in 2016, has been fairly open about wanting to replace agents’ use of a multiple listing service when it comes to finding homes for clients. The recent Rapattoni hack put it front and center in getting a foothold.
Norman listed an open house for one of her properties on Zenlist. “I had a huge turnout,” she says. “Even though I advertised it in the Press Democrat as well, most of the people attending said they saw it online.”
“Zenlist was the first viable alternative we agents had,” says Alexander Narodny, co-owner of Alamere Real Estate in Corte Madera. “BAREIS introduced it on Aug. 20; before that we really didn’t have anything,” noting that BAREIS, or Bay Area Real Estate Information Services first tried to link agents to a Google spreadsheet for listings and open houses. Norman notes that the spreadsheet is something other MLS groups across the country use, but it’s not regularly available to North Bay agents.
Company websites
Many North Bay agents slogged through the outage by making more use of their own company platforms, which were a godsend.
Sevenau can’t stop singing the praises of Compass’ unique platform, which was built from top to bottom to allow agents to do everything without having to go into different websites.
“Basically, they created something that’s vertical, not fractured,” he explains. Compass takes the entire MLS feed, including agent-only and confidential remarks, something Zillow, Redfin and other third-party websites don’t provide. Sevenau uses the Compass platform almost exclusively and rarely goes to MLS. “I get all the same information and the same notes,” on the Compass platform, he says. While other agents were left in the dark about such things as showing instructions, Sevenau says he was able to “keep doing business as usual. Nothing really changed except there were no new listings, no old listings and I couldn’t change status as I put things into contract. But I was able to set up appointments, see showing instructions and get my buyers into properties just like I normally did.
“It’s not a shameless Compass plug,” Sevenau says, “but we’re the only brokerage out there with that technology.”
Pennypacker found the Sotheby’s website highly reliable and when Rapattoni came back online—minus all the photographs of the properties—Pennypacker discovered a quick way to restore pictures of his properties without the pain of reloading them individually.
“I downloaded all of the photos from the Sotheby’s site all at once and then uploaded them to MLS all at once, so they stayed in the same order,” he explains. “At least I didn’t have to rethink that!”
BAREIS to the rescue
While NorthBay biz attempts to reach BAREIS for comment on the outage elicited no responses, the agents the magazine talked with were unanimous in their support of BAREIS’ efforts on their behalf. “BAREIS did a great job of communicating,” says Sevenau. “Their frustration and what they went through I cannot imagine. They worked hard on the workarounds, and I know they were doing everything they could do to get it resolved. Every day we got updated emails letting us know where we were at [as to getting things up and running]. They did a great job keeping everyone calm. They worked really, really hard and did a great job of trying to manage this thing and providing workarounds. We agents appreciate BAREIS. They work hard for us. I love Compass’s app and technology, but we really need both.”
“I can imagine they were overwhelmed,” says Pennypacker.
“BAREIS was great. I think they did a good job of helping us through,” says Norman. “It was something totally out of their control.”
Silvas says BAREIS “did a good job keeping us informed and finding alternative solutions. We are dependent upon MLS and the services it provides.”
Fallout
While things have returned to somewhat normal, agents are quick to point out there were some serious downsides to the hack.
Narodny was just in the process of listing a new property at 57 Bay Way in San Rafael.
“I couldn’t log in. I couldn’t list it. Fortunately, my seller was cool about the whole thing. Had he been in a crunch and really needed to sell immediately, it would have been a bigger thing because for two weeks I couldn’t put it on the market.”
Norman also had a new listing. “I had to put it in the Google spreadsheet before we got access to Zenlist,” she says. “And agents had to call for showing instructions.”
Pennypacker had a land listing ready to go on market. “Fortunately, they weren’t in any hurry,” he says. “I think where it hurt me the most was not being able to do market research. There were no comps for a market analysis.” And then there was the issue about the photos. “We could get information, but there were no pictures. And that’s what everyone looks at.”
Jones-Quinn says the outage “disintegrates trust level” in the service.
Narodny notes that some houses sold during the outage “didn’t get the exposure they deserved,” which could have resulted in lower buying offers. And he definitely believes the hack had a temporary impact on the market once Rapattoni returned.
“The first 48 hours after the MLS came back on, there were more than 100 new listings in Marin. What that did was temporarily change the market,” he believes. “All of a sudden you have all this competition and that drastically impacts value.”
The future
What lessons did real estate agents learn from the hack?
“It is now abundantly clear agents don’t have really viable alternatives to MLS and the industry doesn’t either,” Narodny points out. There are no competitors to MLS, and there probably should be. We can’t kill MLS, but to not have anything else is a real problem. I think there is a market for competition.”
Meanwhile, Pennypacker looks at the bright side.
“It’s an opportunity for people to come and make things better. I think—and I hope—when everything comes back it will be more secure. But I also think it’s good to open up the users’ eyes that there are a whole lot of other ways to get things done,” Pennypacker says.
