BrokerScience » Real Estate

Dear Realtor.com: This is How You Communicate With Your Users

Trace Richardson — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 03:59:00 +0000

Redfin suffered about the worst occurrence a datacenter can endure, fire. They still beat Realtor.com by 12 hours with only 5 hours of downtime compared to Realtor.com’s 17 hours of downtime or 53 hours of downtime if you include the 36 hours of in-action before going offline for 17 hours after their blog was hacked. In fact, the once daily posts on the Realtor.com blog have ceased altogether for over two weeks, so it is apparent that the problem is not under control, unless giving hard working / blogging Realtors less exposure is part of an unannounced strategy.

That’s right, their datacenter caught fire and they still smoked Realtor.com, pun intended. There is only one right way to handle such a situation: quickly, honestly and transparently. If Redfin gets this, why can’t Realtor.com?

Chris Neitzert Sorts Through Charred Rubble of Redfin Datacenter

There was a fire in the Seattle-based data center that Redfin uses to host our web servers, causing a loss of service between approximately 5 a.m. and 10 a.m. Pacific Time. The entire data center was shut down by the fire department, including universal power supplies. Thanks to Redfin’s Chris Neitzert and his team, the site is now up and running. Throughout the interruption, our agents have of course stayed at their posts working with clients. But as the data center installs new equipment, it is possible that we will experience much-briefer interruptions in our website service around midnight tonight. We will continue to be available by telephone at 877-973-3346 or through the direct number our clients have for their agents.
For now, we apologize for the interruption in our service.

Aftermath of Realtor.com Blog Hack

FREE Real Estate RSS Icons!

Trace Richardson — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 23:11:57 +0000

UPDATE: The Real Estate RSS Icons are now located at LeadPress.

View FREE Real Estate RSS Icons

Get your free BrokerScience RSS Feed Icons Now! Download after the jump!

To download, simply right click on image and “save image as” to desktop!

Realtor.com Hacked Day 8: It’s Not Going Away

Trace Richardson — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 00:54:43 +0000

Once daily posts halted for a week. 36 hour delay in acknowledging hack. 19 hours of downtime. No communication with the Realtor community as to whether their personal data was compromised or even an acknowledgment that the site was even hacked.

Previous Coverage: It all started here.

Realtor.com Hacked Day 7: Nobody Notices or Cares

Trace Richardson — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 05:24:45 +0000

For the seventh day in a row Realtor.com is failing to communicate with its community regarding the hack that we first reported on June 4th. Realtor.com is approaching one week with no blog posts, no communication with its paid users and increasing doubt in its ability to run a blog, let alone one of the largest real estate portals in the world, Realtor.com. This is bad folks.

Another stunning story comes from 4Realz.net with news that weeks ago, following in Zillow’s footsteps, Realtor.com launched a new home estimates feature. Again, nobody noticed and nobody cared. Perhaps this is why Realtor.com thinks they can behave in the manner they have and get away with it. The fact is that if nobody notices what you do or don’t do and you are a company with the reach and funding of Realtor.com / NAR, that should be a warning that you are not doing things right, not something to be used as a shield to hide behind.

Realtor.com Hacked Day 5: Communication Breakdown

Trace Richardson — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 06:15:45 +0000

The original posts that had spam injected to them have been removed. The daily blog posts have halted and communication about the situation is non-existent. This is turning uglier by the minute. Where is Blaine Cooke when you need him? {sarcasm}

Realtor.com Hacked Day 4: No Announcement, Users Wait in Silence

Trace Richardson — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 04:22:04 +0000

(Previous Realtor.com coverage – Realtor.com Hacked Day 1 / Realtor.com Hacked Day 2 / Realtor.com Hacked Day 3 )

In an unfortunate turn of events, Realtor.com has failed to acknowledge its website and or servers were breached and has failed to inform users whether or not personal data was compromised. This is disturbing on a number of levels. While the breach may have been as simple as a flawed wordpress plugin or much worse, nobody can know for sure due to Realtor.com’s failure to communicate.

Realtor.com Failure to Communicate Fallout:

It signals to users that they are not valued and builds distrust and disloyalty in users.
Fails to inform users if their data was compromised, on a legal basis, my guess is that users have a right to be informed as such.
Is counterproductive to fostering community.
Shows lack of leadership on the part of Realtor.com team members.
Gives credence to criticism that Realtor.com does not act in members’ best interests.

Common Courtesy. After repeatedly informing Realtor.com that their website had been compromised, they failed to acknowledge our requests and failed to give us any feedback on the situation at hand. Oddly enough, despite their lack of communication with BrokerScience and Realtor.com users, their IP Address, 209.74.96.62, shows up as one of the most frequent visitors in BrokerScience traffic logs.

To be more specific, the IP Address of HomeStore.com shows up. It is not clear whether HomeStore is now considered a parent or partner of Realtor.com or whether it only shows up because the ARIN record has not been updated since 2001. It does, however, serve as a reminder of Realtor.com’s past and may provide a clue to the company culture that exists that would allow such a basic, preventable and unheard of gaffe to occur.

BrokerScience IP Address Traffic Log



NetRange:   209.74.96.0 - 209.74.127.255 

OrgName:    Homestore.com, Inc
OrgID:      HOMEST-7
Address:    30700 Russell Ranch Rd
City:       Westlake Village
StateProv:  CA
PostalCode: 91362
Country:    US

Realtor.com Blog Hacked Day 3: Down for 17 Hours and Counting

Trace Richardson — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 18:43:59 +0000

(Previous Realtor.com coverage – Realtor.com Hacked Day 1 / Realtor.com Hacked Day 2)

At around 7 PM last night the Realtor.com Blog was taken offline. 17 hours later and counting, they are still down. The speculation is that a wordpress plugin was at fault, but that remains to be seen.

We are still scratching our heads over how nobody at Realtor.com noticed the hack in their RSS readers, why no action was taken when we notified them of the hack for over 36 hours and why securing the website and servers is taking 17 hours and counting.

Realtor.com is not a mom and pop shop, they take in millions from hard working Realtors and should be held to a higher standard. Have you ever seen Trulia, Zillow, Redfin or HomeGain down for 17 hours? Of course not.

Realtor.com has yet to release comment or respond to our request for comment.

Update: As of 2:30 PM, the site is back up minus the specific posts that had injected spam for a total downtime of around 19 hours. Wow. Still waiting for an official response from a Realtor.com spokesperson. My hope is that they do not fail to address the issue and communicate with the Realtor.com community and bloggers that use their service. Failure to make users aware of the circumstances involved with the hack (considering its anyone’s guess whether personal data was compromised) would be unfortunate for the Realtor.com blogging community.

Realtor.com Blog Hacked Day 2: Google Delisting on the Horizon

Trace Richardson — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 21:58:53 +0000

For the second day in a row, Realtor.com has failed to secure their website after it was hacked as we reported yesterday. Their failure to secure Realtor.com can have many implications, depending on how badly the site has been compromised. These range from the possible exposure of user’s personal data to the very real possibility that the site will be de-listed from Google very soon (Google does this to protect webmasters once they see a site has been compromised). Note that you will not see the spam links unless you view the direct source code or read the blog through an RSS reader.

Since the Realtor.com blog is actually located on a sub-domain at talk.realtor.com, my suspicion is that this could also lead to adverse effects or de-listing by Google of the primary domain of Realtor.com. I pinged Aaron Wall of SEOBook.com and Rand Fishkin of SEOMOZ.org and they concurred that issues with the sub-domain could indirectly affect the primary domain of Realtor.com

I also just noticed they DO have a contact page link if you look hard enough that I didn’t see yesterday before I emailed one of their bloggers yesterday…. let’s see if a quick email changes the situation.

The Real Question. Am I the ONLY person that gets the Realtor.com Blog FEED? Does not one employee of the NAR / Realtor.com team read their own blog / feed? I’m just saying…….

Sample of Spam Links Injected into Code (Click image below for full view)

Follow Up: Realtor.com Hacked Day 3

Realtor.com Blog Hacked

Trace Richardson — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 20:34:34 +0000

As I was browing through my feeds this morning I came across the following feed (original post here) that has had spam injected into it. The spam shows up in the original post source code but is not displayed in because of the use of the “style=display:hidden” tag, a common tactic by hackers. I would have contacted “RDC Blogger” but they have no contact form. I shot one of the featured bloggers a short email from the email I found on their home blog.

(Click on image for full length image)

Original post:

Countrywide CEO Mozilo Calls Homeowner Disgusting? Not so fast.

Trace Richardson — Wed, 21 May 2008 06:16:30 +0000

Dan Bailey is a homeowner facing foreclosure. He emailed a letter to 20 Countrywide employees in hopes of arranging a a deal that would prevent foreclosure of his home. In response, he was accidentally sent an email purportedly from none other then Countrywide CEO, Angelo Mozilo. The email reads: This is unbelievable. Most of these letters now have the same wording. Obviously they are being counseled by some other person or by the Internet. Disgusting.

After mild chatter throughout the blogosphere regarding the matter of how Mozilo is calling homeowners disgusting, I commented on Bloodhound regarding what a couple minute google search turned up:

While Angelo was wrong to pass judgment without the full facts concerning the borrower, he was right about one thing: The borrower is using a standardized hardship form letter that is circulating around the internet. The owner of the forum you have cited above at loansafe.org has posted this very form letter / cookie cutter hardship letter on his Active Rain page here: http://tinyurl.com/3t7vxz and you can find it circulating around the internet in places like here on sites like iamfacingahomeforeclosure.com : http://tinyurl.com/3m95b6

I would imagine that if you are seeing hundreds or thousands of versions of the same letter, the letter would tend to lose its credibility over time……and might appear to be more of a tactic then a genuine letter asking for help….

This evening the story hit the LA Times and Blown Mortgage as well. It will likely make national headlines in coming days given the sensational potential of the headline in and of itself.

There are couple important points to be made:

The email timeline given is incomplete. There is an email communication between a couple parties with a random “quote” attributed to Angelo Mozilo, this isn’t just strange, it doesn’t add up. I still can’t get a complete picture of exactly what the timeline of the discourse is after a handful of reads.
Angelo Mozilo is referring to what appears to be a new wave of such standardized cookie cutter form letters as being disgusting, not the borrower. As I mention above, it would be very hard to take a form letter seriously after you have received it hundreds or thousands of times. It is very likely that among the many sincere homeowners Mozilo deals with on a regular basis that he also sees many that are simply trying to fraudulently get out of loans or catch breaks on the basis of hardship. This is to be expected.

Come to think of it, who writes their hardship letter over email? Perhaps many, but in my mind if you are in a tough spot and are asking and pleading for help to save your home, common sense would dictate that a real letter is in order. If you don’t write a real order when your home is at stake, when do you? In any case, you are well advised to NOT send any email correspondence in any business matter to 20 employees of the company you are attempting to correspond with as this gentlemen has done, that is called spamming and is not how you endear people to your cause.

The point is that the story is lacking credible evidence at its surface and even if the email is proven credible, Mozilo’s comments don’t appear to have been directed at the homeowner in the first place. From what I have read there is plenty of dirt on Mozilo to write about, but this isn’t it. Let’s do our homework here folks before we start yelling fire, a simple read of the email itself would indicate all is not right with this story. Let’s see how the national media runs with this headline.