Hackers have brought San Francisco’s real estate market to its knees with a cyberattack that disabled the city’s primary property listings database and left home buyers and sellers scrambling for workarounds.
The attack occurred nearly two weeks ago, targeting the company that runs the so-called multiple listing service, or MLS, used by realtors in San Francisco. Rapattoni, the Los Angeles–based software company that runs the MLS, has proven unable to restore the platform, leaving subscribers locked out of a crucial database.
“At this time, we still do not have a clear timeline on when services will be fully restored,” the San Francisco Association of Realtors wrote in a message on its website on Friday. The ability to add new property listings directly into the system and to edit existing listings will not be available until at least Saturday, which would be twelve days after the August 8 attack.
The hack is an embarrassing turn of events in San Francisco, the capital of the tech industry, where employees at some of the world’s most powerful tech companies, such as Google, Meta, and Apple, regularly bid up prices for houses by hundreds of thousands of dollars above the asking price.
MLSs are private databases where agents post their listings with photos, descriptions, open house times and contact information. Consumer-facing websites like Zillow and Redfin pull their information from these databases. It is unclear who the hackers are and if the attack is a ransomware attack, in which hackers demand a payment to restore service. Rapattoni did not respond to requests for comment.
“It was a real shit show,” said Payton Stiewe, a San Francisco realtor who co-founded his own firm. Stiewe hasn’t been able to log into his Rapattoni account in 11 days, and his company has had to rely on what he calls the “traditional” ways of doing the job. He has made phone calls to agents, created email campaigns and posted properties on social media to communicate what he’s selling to other realtors.
While it has been a learning curve, Stiewe also described it as a bonding experience in the San Francisco real estate community. “I’ve gotten more phone calls from my colleagues in the last week and a half than the whole first part of this year,” he told Fortune.
In a press release on Friday, the SF Realtors Association said that Rapattoni is "actively pursuing solutions to expedite service restoration, such as decrypting locked servers and reconstructing new ones from backup files. Regrettably, these efforts have not yet provided a resolution."
The tech problem isn’t only facing San Francisco, whose commercial real estate market has struggled to recover since the pandemic. Rapattoni serves markets across the country, including greater California, Northeastern Indiana and Cincinnati, Ohio. Rapattoni has an estimated 56,000 subscribers who rely solely on the platform to do their jobs, according to data from real estate consultancy T3 Sixty shared with Fortune. T3 Sixty estimates an additional 182,000 Rapattoni users have subscriptions to multiple databases, so they didn’t have to change their operations as much as Stiewe.
Rapattoni is the fifth biggest MLS service provider in the U.S., with a market share of 5%, according to a report by T3 Sixty published in December 2021, the most recent data available. But the company’s market share has been diminishing in the last five years, said Clint Skutchan, a T3 Sixty executive who has 15 years of experience in the real estate industry and works specifically with MLSs.
For the real estate clients Skutchan works with, their reasons for switching database providers is often related to Rapattoni’s technology. While many of these database providers have user interfaces that feel archaic, he said, Rapattoni has especially dropped the ball in looking and feeling contemporary. The company has also had a difficult time transitioning its data to an API, or a software that allows computers to talk to each other. This has contributed to its mobile experience being low quality, he said.
“If you’re not keeping up with modern technology to serve clients’ needs, that could be corollary to having some exposure [to cyber attacks],” Skutchan told Fortune.
