Houston lost access to their public port to the MLS over the past week after unnamed hackers inserted virus code onto the site and the developers had to do a line by line code check ot make sure that all infections were gone. While not affecting the MLS system accessed by Realtors, the outage did keep the public from searching the database of homes in the Houston area.

There is anectdotal evidence that the inability for the public to access the data caused a slowdown, it would be very interesting to see what impact it had on showings and listings over this period. Greg Swann over at Bloodhound Realty took a tongue in cheek poke at the statistics of real estate home buyer (voyuers), but this would be an interesting case study for some aspiring numbers geek.

I believe that real estate and the internet are forever married until a better suitor comes about. While the internet will rarely sell a house itself, it empowers buyers and agents to provide a much more fluid and intelligent transaction.

House hunters lost the ability to search the more than 50,000 properties on har.com when the association took the site offline as a precautionary measure after learning that the hacker began loading a virus onto HAR servers. The shutdown also affected thousands of member and company Web sites hosted by those servers.
Association members, however, were still able to post and access listings through the Multiple Listing Service portion of the system that only they have access to.
“It did not affect the ability for any agent to operate in any fashion,” said Cheri Fama, senior vice president of Heritage Texas Properties’ Inner Loop office.
Fama said the number of showings during the weekend weren’t affected, but the company had to increase its staff in order to manually notify home sellers and agents of showings, which was being done through an appointment manager component of har.com. via Houston Chronicle

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