North Bay real estate listings outage turns corner 9 days after cyberattack

A massive outage now in its ninth day for real estate listing services in the North Bay, San Francisco and dozens of markets nationwide could be nearing resolution.

Santa Rosa-based Bay Area Real Estate Information Service, or BAREIS, on Thursday evening told its roughly 8,200 users that the online multiple listing service property information that had been locked up by a cyberattack early last week has been put back into the system. BAREIS serves Napa, Sonoma, Marin, Solano and Mendocino counties.

“Rapattoni has restored our MLS database and we will be seeing access to the MLS system in the coming days!” said the email shared with the North Bay Business Journal.

A late Aug. 8 ransomware attack on Southern California-based Rapattoni Corporation, a data vendor for BAREIS, San Francisco Association of Realtors and other multiple listing service operators, locked out tens of thousands of users from updating and viewing key property information.

Those users primarily are real estate agents, who haven’t been able to easily discover or share the latest property pricing, status and other key details as well as coordinate home showings without workarounds such as texting, phone calls and stop-gap measures implemented by the listing service. Other users include appraisers, who use the listings to prepare reports for mortgage lenders.

A ransomware attack tricks users of a computer system to activate malicious software that digitally locks data, demanding payment to decrypt.

But during the Rapattoni MLS outage, what has helped the users of the North Bay and San Francisco listing services is that they are members of the NorCal MLS Alliance, BAREIS CEO Karen Holmgren told the Business Journal. The decade-old group of seven Northern California MLSes copies listing information between each other every 15 minutes, so there was an archive.

Since the outage, the North Bay and San Francisco listing services have been rolling out workarounds.

BAREIS worked with alliance member MetroList in Sacramento to allow viewing of archived listings by Aug. 6. As of Thursday it had set up an internal system for users to add and view listings since the outage and note price and status changes.

The San Francisco trade group as of Wednesday had worked through its existing partnership with local startup Zenlist, which connects agents with clients, to allow adding of new listings, importing of pre-outage listings for editing, and as of schedule open houses and broker tours. The Zenlist updates on listings would feed to public listings website Zillow, and as of Friday the open house dates would flow over.

The San Francisco group said Friday that direct access to the MLS for adding and editing listings wouldn’t be available until Saturday.

“We understand that this attack has led to both inconvenience and frustration for many involved in the real estate industry,” said San Francisco Association of Realtors CEO Walt Baczkowski in a statement. “However, if there is anything we know from these challenges, it’s that San Francisco Realtors are some of the most industrious and tenacious in the field, always going above and beyond to provide the best service to their clients. We see them continuing to work and serve their clients despite these challenges and we expect them and our Association to come out stronger for it.”

The National Association of Realtors on Thursday wrote in its online magazine that during the MLS outage members of the agent trade group could use its Realtors Property Resource tool to access archived listings as of Aug. 8 for all the Rapattoni-served MLSes. The association said it sent that notice to 23 MLSes.

Rapattoni couldn’t be reached for comment. It’s last statements about the attack and restoration were on Aug. 12 via X and Facebook.

Jeff Quackenbush covers wine, construction and real estate. Reach him at jquackenbush@busjrnl.com or 707-521-4256.