North Bay real estate listings system back online 16 days after cyberattack
Over 14,000 real estate agents, appraisers and other professionals working markets in the North Bay and San Francisco got a welcome announcement Wednesday morning, more than two weeks since a cyberattack left them without direct access to online property listings systems that have become key to how transactions get done.
Santa Rosa-based Bay Area Real Estate Information Service Inc., or BAREIS, and San Francisco Association of Realtors told their users that they could directly log in to the multiple listing services as of 9 a.m. Wednesday, according to a BAREIS email and a support site post by the San Francisco trade group.
BAREIS has about 8,200 users and serves Napa, Sonoma, Solano, Marin and Mendocino counties.
A ransomware attack late Aug. 8 against a data vendor for Southern California-based Rapattoni Corp. locked users of 22 MLSes in California and nationwide from being able to make changes such as add property listings and make key updates such as new pricing and whether the home was still on the market.
That shut off the latest property information from the affected areas from going to public real estate websites. BAREIS and the San Francisco group rolled out workarounds in the days and weeks following the attack, which digitally locked the data and demanded payment to unlock.
The North Bay and San Francisco MLSes planned to resume their feeds of listing data to public websites at 2 p.m. Wednesday.
“We are now armed with the housing knowledge we had been missing in the past 2 weeks,” Jeremy King, a Coldwell Banker agent in Petaluma, wrote in an email.
“It definitely feels like business as normal now,” King added.
BAREIS wrote in an email to users Monday as the data restoration was almost complete that the service’s board plans to meet in late August to consider alternatives and contingencies so such an outage doesn’t recur.
Rapattoni on Tuesday afternoon posted on X (formerly Twitter) its first public update since Aug. 12 on the outage.
The company hasn’t responded to requests for comment.
Jeff Quackenbush covers wine, construction and real estate. Reach him at jquackenbush@busjrnl.com or 707-521-4256.
