Many real estate professionals have been searching for answers since Wednesday after being unable to access their personal websites, lead services and other tools offered by Boomtown, brokers told Inman.
This article has been updated to provide more details about the issues facing the company and its solutions.
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Agents across the country are making their voices heard online, Inman has learned, days after real estate software company BoomTown experienced an outage this week, affecting access to agents’ consumer-facing websites and other tools.
Real estate agents told Inman they lost access to their personal websites overnight on April 10, as well as leading services and other tools offered by the company. Photographed by Inside Real Estate early last year. The outage likely affected tens of thousands of real estate agents, leaving them unable to interact with prospects and clients for half a week.
“There’s no explanation as to why and no timetable for fixes. It’s crazy,” a South Carolina agent told Inman. “We couldn’t get any specific information from them. They wouldn’t answer any questions. We personally have 100,000 potential customers.”
On Friday, Inside Real Estate CEO Joe Skousen told clients that the company had discovered an issue with the company’s servers and would begin restoring agents’ access to its tools during a phased recovery process over the weekend.
BoomTown provides services to agents who manage their websites to market to clients, and many told Inman they struggled to communicate with clients during the outage. When it was acquired last year, BoomTown reported 100,000 customers.
“It’s been four days now,” South Carolina real estate agent Rhonda Dunning told Inman. “My clients, they can see I’m still there, but they can’t access any of the properties. Just found out the site is down. It seems I no longer exist to them.”
Agents rely on BoomTown to reach potential clients—an especially valuable resource in a down market. Other tools provide clients with comparative market analysis, but it is unclear whether access to all tools has been closed.Company owned Agents told Inman the importance of using its website’s tools was emphasized, and ongoing outages have prevented agents from accessing these leads.
Others have been making contingency plans to stay connected with customers during outages. South Carolina broker Greg Flanagan advised agents to find other ways to reach clients during the outage.
“A lot of people use Constant Contact, SurveyMonkey and/or Mailchimp to send out newsletters and things like that,” said Flanagan, whose site was still down as of Friday morning. “Be sure to go out there and notify your customers that there’s an outage. Give them a chance to look up your searches and things like that on your MLS feed.”
Multiple agents told Inman they wanted more information from the company, and some agents have gone to BoomTown’s public social media pages to request information. The company was asked if it had been hacked and how BoomTown planned to rectify the temporary shutdown.
After Inman contacted BoomTown and its parent company, Inside Real Estate, the company sent an automated text message with an update and the promise of more information.
“I’m very sorry for your continued frustration and I know this is a very stressful situation,” the company wrote. “The best place to get the most immediate updates is through the Facebook community where you can continue to monitor status.boomtownroi. com page.”
Representatives for Inside Real Estate did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“We experienced a server outage and restoring service to our customers is our top priority,” BoomTown spokesperson Lee Bressan said in an email Friday morning.
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