• Home
  • Latest
  • Fortune 500
  • Finance
  • Tech
  • Leadership
  • Lifestyle
  • Rankings
  • Multimedia

Trendingnow

1

Shark Tank's Kevin O'Leary says if he were 25 today, he'd chase these two booming opportunities in the world of AI

2

Even as Elon Musk calls philanthropy ‘very hard,’ everyday Americans gave a record $617 billion—despite feeling the squeeze over the cost of living

3

Ex-PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi worked from midnight until 5 a.m. as a receptionist to pay for her Yale degree—and she says ‘respect went up’ because of it

1

Shark Tank's Kevin O'Leary says if he were 25 today, he'd chase these two booming opportunities in the world of AI

2

Even as Elon Musk calls philanthropy ‘very hard,’ everyday Americans gave a record $617 billion—despite feeling the squeeze over the cost of living

3

Ex-PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi worked from midnight until 5 a.m. as a receptionist to pay for her Yale degree—and she says ‘respect went up’ because of it
TechSan Francisco

San Francisco’s real estate market has been crippled by a cyberattack on the main property listings database, and there’s ‘no clear timeline’ on a fix

Rachyl Jones
By
Rachyl Jones
Rachyl Jones
Down Arrow Button Icon
Rachyl Jones
By
Rachyl Jones
Rachyl Jones
Down Arrow Button Icon
August 18, 2023, 6:00 PM ET
Tayfun Coskun—Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
Add Fortune on Google for similar content.

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.

Recommended Video

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.

About the Author
Rachyl Jones
By Rachyl Jones
LinkedIn iconTwitter icon
See full bioRight Arrow Button Icon
Add Fortune on Google for similar content.

Latest in Tech

Finance
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam
By Fortune Editors
October 20, 2025
Finance
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam
By Fortune Editors
October 20, 2025
Finance
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam
By Fortune Editors
October 20, 2025
Finance
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam
By Fortune Editors
October 20, 2025
Finance
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam
By Fortune Editors
October 20, 2025
Finance
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam
By Fortune Editors
October 20, 2025

Most Popular

Finance
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam
By Fortune Editors
October 20, 2025
Finance
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam
By Fortune Editors
October 20, 2025
Finance
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam
By Fortune Editors
October 20, 2025
Finance
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam
By Fortune Editors
October 20, 2025
Finance
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam
By Fortune Editors
October 20, 2025
Finance
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam
By Fortune Editors
October 20, 2025
Fortune Secondary Logo
Rankings
  • 100 Best Companies
  • Fortune 500
  • Global 500
  • Fortune 500 Europe
  • Most Powerful Women
  • World's Most Admired Companies
  • See All Rankings
  • Lists Calendar
Sections
  • Finance
  • Fortune Crypto
  • Features
  • Leadership
  • Health
  • Commentary
  • Success
  • Retail
  • Mpw
  • Tech
  • Lifestyle
  • CEO Initiative
  • Asia
  • Politics
  • Conferences
  • Europe
  • Newsletters
  • Personal Finance
  • Environment
  • Magazine
  • Education
Customer Support
  • Frequently Asked Questions
  • Customer Service Portal
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms Of Use
  • Single Issues For Purchase
  • International Print
Commercial Services
  • Advertising
  • Fortune Brand Studio
  • Fortune Analytics
  • Fortune Conferences
  • Business Development
  • Group Subscriptions
About Us
  • About Us
  • Press Center
  • Work At Fortune
  • Terms And Conditions
  • Site Map
  • About Us
  • Press Center
  • Work At Fortune
  • Terms And Conditions
  • Site Map
  • Facebook icon
  • Twitter icon
  • LinkedIn icon
  • Instagram icon
  • Pinterest icon

Latest in Tech

Exclusive: Xbox’s CEO on 3,200 layoffs, four studios cut, and her blunt warning that ‘we spread ourselves too thin’
Big TechMicrosoft
Exclusive: Xbox’s CEO on 3,200 layoffs, four studios cut, and her blunt warning that ‘we spread ourselves too thin’
By Sebastian HerreraJuly 6, 2026
11 hours ago
‘Our business today is not healthy’: 1,600 Xbox employees among the 4,800 laid off by Microsoft as it looks to ‘reset’ gaming division
Big TechMicrosoft
‘Our business today is not healthy’: 1,600 Xbox employees among the 4,800 laid off by Microsoft as it looks to ‘reset’ gaming division
By The Associated PressJuly 6, 2026
12 hours ago
EasyJet’s stock shows Castlelake bid is far from a done deal
InvestingEasyJet
EasyJet’s stock shows Castlelake bid is far from a done deal
By Kate Duffy and BloombergJuly 6, 2026
14 hours ago
Torsten Slok holds his hands apart as he speaks on stage.
AIProductivity
Top economist says AI just hasn’t delivered on the productivity hype—and it means a ‘painful repricing’ of markets is very possible
By Sasha RogelbergJuly 6, 2026
15 hours ago
In this photo illustration, a Microsoft logo is displayed on a smartphone with Artificial Intelligence (AI) symbols on the background.
AICFO Daily
Microsoft’s Frontier push aims to turn AI spending into measurable returns
By Sheryl EstradaJuly 6, 2026
16 hours ago
A businesswoman uses a smartphone in modern conference room.
NewslettersFortune Workplace Innovation
The tech attention crisis has hit the workplace. One company thinks AI is the cure
By Kristin StollerJuly 6, 2026
16 hours ago

Most Popular

Shark Tank's Kevin O'Leary says if he were 25 today, he'd chase these two booming opportunities in the world of AI
AI
Shark Tank's Kevin O'Leary says if he were 25 today, he'd chase these two booming opportunities in the world of AI
By Marco Quiroz-GutierrezJuly 5, 2026
2 days ago
Even as Elon Musk calls philanthropy ‘very hard,’ everyday Americans gave a record $617 billion—despite feeling the squeeze over the cost of living
Success
Even as Elon Musk calls philanthropy ‘very hard,’ everyday Americans gave a record $617 billion—despite feeling the squeeze over the cost of living
By Preston ForeJuly 4, 2026
3 days ago
Ex-PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi worked from midnight until 5 a.m. as a receptionist to pay for her Yale degree—and she says ‘respect went up’ because of it
Success
Ex-PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi worked from midnight until 5 a.m. as a receptionist to pay for her Yale degree—and she says ‘respect went up’ because of it
By Preston ForeJuly 6, 2026
12 hours ago
Egg companies made $1.22 billion in profit off a $6 carton — now they’re buying their way out of a price-fixing case with 53 million donated eggs
Law
Egg companies made $1.22 billion in profit off a $6 carton — now they’re buying their way out of a price-fixing case with 53 million donated eggs
By Wyatte Grantham-Philips and The Associated PressJuly 2, 2026
4 days ago
Gen Z was 'jaded about employment before we ever entered the workforce'—now psychologists say the stare has hardened into something worse
Economy
Gen Z was 'jaded about employment before we ever entered the workforce'—now psychologists say the stare has hardened into something worse
By Nick LichtenbergJuly 6, 2026
21 hours ago
The stock market is about to suffer a 'snapback' and will lose much of this year's gains as 'speculation is hitting extreme levels,' BofA warns
Investing
The stock market is about to suffer a 'snapback' and will lose much of this year's gains as 'speculation is hitting extreme levels,' BofA warns
By Jason MaJuly 5, 2026
1 day ago

© 2026 Fortune Media IP Limited. All Rights Reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy | CA Notice at Collection and Privacy Notice | Do Not Sell/Share My Personal Information
FORTUNE is a trademark of Fortune Media IP Limited, registered in the U.S. and other countries. FORTUNE may receive compensation for some links to products and services on this website. Offers may be subject to change without notice.