Social engineering attacks are real estate companies’ most significant collective cybersecurity risk. This grouping includes data wire transfers, CEO fraud, and phishing emails or calls. A hacker may pose as a trusted but unknown person, like a vendor or new employee, to gain access to company credentials. Or the perpetrator may impersonate a company leader and send a fraudulent email to request access to payroll records. Business email compromise (BEC) attacks are another form of cybercrime to be on the lookout for, as bad actors who successfully hack into a corporate email will imitate the owner’s identity to defraud the company and its employees, customers or partners. Ransomware, when a hacker or hacker group gains access to a computer network or server and holds it hostage, can cause work stoppage, financial losses, and potential reputation damage.

The less prepared a company is, the more vulnerable it is to hackers and fraudsters. The growing prevalence of blockchain is altering the way we share databases and processes. Transforming many industries, this type of technology has an especially significant impact on the real estate industry. Technology has the power to make a monumental transformation in the current real estate ecosystem, and blockchain is one of the significant catalysts leading this movement.

Blockchains are transaction networks. A blockchain is a globally replicated, secure database. You can think of it as an immutable, permanent and secure spreadsheet in the cloud which de-risks liability thanks to its distributed nature. It is effectively a decentralised database that can’t be compromised, ensuring the integrity of the data and allowing for untamperable record-creation for every property in the country.

For real estate agents, if blockchain were to become mainstream, it could dramatically reduce the potential for fraud and enable us to access much more data on individual properties and homeowners. Good news for real estate agents and their customers, it would also require agents to integrate blockchain data entry and information within their current workflows.