3 Devastating Threats for Real Estate Businesses in 2025
It’s the nightmare scenario. It probably starts with some text messages from your team saying the system is down, so you hop onto your laptop to see for yourself what’s going on and are shocked to see all your data is gone. The lifeblood of your business is now just a blank screen.
Real estate brokers handle vast amounts of sensitive data, from client financial details to property information. Cloud based databases and digital documents have brought many efficiencies, but it’s also created new vulnerabilities. This makes data ownership and protection a top priority for brokers.
Here are 3 business halting threats to make sure you’re prepared for:
1. Ransomware
“One minute the information was there and the next minute it was all gone. The supplier communicated with us that they had suffered a ransomware attack and they were working to get it back up and running. However, this didn’t happen, and the system is still down several months later.”
Every four seconds an organization is attacked by Ransomware. In just a few years that rate is expected to increase to every two seconds. As attackers grow more sophisticated, real estate tools and systems become prime targets because of the financial and operational impact of disrupted access to critical files. A ransomware attack can lock down a transaction management or back office system full of data essential to your business, halting transactions and damaging client trust.
2. Vendor Outage
““While we’re getting better at software development as a field, we are still a long way from being able to guarantee that complex systems won’t have bugs like this,””
It’s not always a malicious act that can take the systems and tools you use offline. Sometimes its simple a relatively minor mistake. As software systems and cloud computing and tools get more powerful they also get more complicated which means more opportunity for errors. It’s also important to realize the apps you use often rely on a host of other technologies from other companies to run, each with it’s own opportunity to create an error taking down the system with data your team needs to access.
3. Sudden Need to Move Systems
2025 is looking to be a year where mergers and acquisition activity hits record highs. It’s going to be an exciting time! It could also mean that companies that provide the real estate software you and your team rely on could get acquired. Once aquired the new owners may radically change or even shut down those systems in relatively short order. All the data you’ve been feeding into your apps suddenly in peril as you try to pry it out to safety before the lights go out.
Even if your software provider doesn’t get acquired or shut down, you’ll inevitably be making a decision soon whether to extend your current contract with your real estate tech partners. If your data is only inside that partners system you may feel locked into their tech ecosystem, and sign a contract you regret.
What to do?
A powerful hedge against the threat of ransomware, outages, and tech partner acquisition is to create a system where your business data is consistently being captured and stored in your own personal “data lake”. It will also give your data more portability, freeing your brokerage up to only sign contracts with real estate tech partners you find useful, not just the ones where your data is currently stored.
Maybe you have processes set up already for your team to try and remember to manually save copies of data and documents into a cloud drive. Luckily, data capture and storage is is a prime candidate for automation.
Want to learn more?
See how API Nation builds the automations to help secure complete data ownership