That’s right, the MLS is back up and running. MLS lite is no more. The work arounds can be abandoned. All systems are go after nearly two weeks of downtime, just in time for the our second selling season which will commence right after Labor Day and stretch into the holidays.
Things were more than a little touch and go for a while there. If you had a new listing in the past two weeks, the big question was whether or not buyers would be able to find you? Furthermore, if they were able to identify that you were on the market, would the address, price, beds and baths and agent/brokerage contact information be enough to get a buyer to look at the house? The spreadsheets being kept by our local BAREIS (Bay Area Real Estate Information Services) MLS set us back to last century, and my impression was that things were a lot less efficient back then.
Today Realtors are busy updating their listings: what has sold, what went into contract, and what is now available. We are back to doing business as usual. Here are a few take aways from the last two weeks:
1) The MLS isn’t entirely necessary. We can live without it (barely), but selling houses is exponentially easier for all stakeholders when the information is readily available at all times.
2) A lot of people are going to be down on Rappatoni, the company that was hacked and oversees our MLS among many others. Yes, they could have and should have been more secure, but I look at this through the lens of the old adage, “Locks are made to keep honest people out.” It doesn’t matter what we do, if a determined group of hackers was targeting Rappatoni it was eventually going to go down. Here’s a partial list of the 15 biggest data breach victims this century (https://www.csoonline.com/article/534628/the-biggest-data-breaches-of-the-21st-century.html): Yahoo, Alibaba, LinkedIn, Facebook, Marriott/Starwood hotels, Experian, MySpace, and Adobe. If these companies couldn’t secure their data, did Rappatoni really have a chance?
3) The real estate business is a big target. We will be targeted again. From that list, both Yahoo and LinkedIn were hit twice.
What can we as Realtors do? You can bet our brokerages are all going to demand that Rappatoni becomes more secure and that they have a viable and readily accessible backup system in the likely event this happens again. On an individual level I think we can only keep our MacAfee and Norton subscriptions up to date. We also need to be aware that scammers are everywhere and working every angle.
In the past few years, criminals have been posing as title companies and redirecting buyers to send their deposits to offshore accounts, never to be seen again. In every transaction we warn our buyers and sellers that this is still happening, and I personally know one Marin agent whose clients lost everything this way: their hopes and dreams of home ownership, and all their money.
What can we do? As Jim Morrison sang in the Roadhouse Blues, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2_X4VTCoEo, “Keep your eyes on the road and your hands upon the wheel. The future’s uncertain and the end is always near.” We just gotta keep up with the times and do the best we can to protect our clients and ourselves.