More than two weeks ago, David Morgan’s son, Alec, first tried to gain access to the MetroTex Association of Realtors MLS systems. Alec, a newly licensed appraiser, wanted his own membership account under Morgan-Mckinney Real Estate Group. The only problem was that the MetroTex vendor that manages membership was the victim of a cyberattack.
Cyberattacks, both ransomware and hacks, are nothing new to the real estate industry. In mid-August, MLS provider Rapottoni was attacked, taking down regional MLS providers across the country. The hack caused chaos in a market where every sale is critical.
For David and Alec, the cyberattack meant that Alec’s membership request sat in limbo.
“When Alec became licensed two weeks ago, we tried to get him a full membership,” David told daltxrealestate.com. He was told that there were more than 900 new membership requests that could not be processed because the third-party membership processing vendor was hacked. “I have called several times and sent emails as well as Alec.”
It took several attempts for David and Alec to find out what was going on. Gordon Yee, membership services director for MetroTex, told them that the systems were finally back online and that they were processing requests as quickly as possible. Today, daltxrealestate.com received a statement from Bill Head, communications director for MetroTex, on the outage:
“MetroTex’s membership systems are back online after extended third-party data center issues. While there was a backlog of requests, a large number of them were not new members but day-to-day membership requests. We have already made significant progress on this backlog, and thanks to diligent work from our member services team we expect to have all records resolved by September 15th.”
