This article was updated with more details about the problem the company is facing and its attempt to fix it.
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Agents nationwide are sounding off — online — days after real estate software company BoomTown suffered an outage that impacted agents’ consumer-facing websites and access to other tools this week, Inman has learned.
Real estate agents told Inman they lost access to their personal sites overnight on April 10, as well as lead services and other tools provided by the company, which was acquired early last year by Inside Real Estate. The outage may have impacted tens of thousands of real estate agents, blocking them from interacting with leads and clients for half the week.
“No explanation on why, no timeline on a fix. It is pretty crazy,” a broker in South Carolina told Inman. “We can’t get anything concrete from them. They will not answer any questions. We personally have 100,000 leads in there.”
On Friday, Inside Real Estate CEO Joe Skousen told clients the company had identified a problem with the company’s servers and would begin restoring agent access to their tools in a phased restoration process over the weekend.
BoomTown provides services to agents who manage their websites for marketing to clients, and many told Inman they were struggling to communicate with clients during the outage. When it was acquired last year, BoomTown reported having 100,000 clients.
“It’s been four days now,” Rhonda Dunning, a Realtor in South Carolina, told Inman. “My clients, they can see that I’m still there but they cannot access any of the properties. It just comes up that the site is down. It looks like I’m no longer in existence to them.”
Agents rely on BoomTown for outreach to leads — a particularly valuable resource in a down market. Other tools offer comparative market analyses for clients, though it’s not clear whether access to all tools is currently down. The company has emphasized the importance of using its website tools, and the ongoing disruption has blocked agents from access to those leads, agents told Inman.
Others have been working on contingency plans to remain in contact with clients during the outage. South Carolina broker Greg Flanagan recommended agents find other ways to reach out to clients during the outage.
“A lot of people use Constant Contact, SurveyMonkey, [and] Mailchimp to deliver their newsletters and stuff like that,” said Flanagan, whose site was still down as of Friday morning. “Definitely go in there and notify your clients that there is an outage. Give them the opportunity to look you up on maybe your MLS feed for searches and that kind of thing.”
Multiple agents told Inman they hoped to receive more information from the company, and some have taken to BoomTown’s public social media pages to demand information. Some asked whether the company was hacked and inquired about how BoomTown planned to rectify the temporary shutdown.
After Inman reached out to BoomTown and parent company Inside Real Estate, the company sent an automated text message with an update and a promise of more information to follow.
“I am so sorry for your continued frustration and I understand this is a very stressful situation,” the company wrote. “The best place to get the most immediate updates is through the Facebook communities and you can continue to monitor the status.boomtownroi.com page.”
Representatives from Inside Real Estate didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
“We experienced a server outage and restoring service for our clients is our top priority,” BoomTown spokeswoman Lee Bressan said in an email Friday morning.
Are you a BoomTown client? Share your experiences with us at the email above or in the comments.
