Real estate brokerage

The situation

A brokerage is a small business with a lot of people moving through it. Agents, an office manager, a transaction coordinator and assistants share listing documents, contracts and client details. Some use office computers and some use their own. People join and leave through the year, and everyone lives in email.

What usually goes wrong

Payment fraud is the one that hurts. An attacker takes over one agent’s mailbox, studies a live transaction and sends convincing payment instructions to the buyer. Because it comes from a real account in a real conversation, it is hard to spot.

Closely behind it:

• Phishing aimed at whoever handles the most documents, to steal a sign-in.
• A former agent whose account and access are still active months after they left.
• Ransomware on a shared office computer that holds transaction files.
• A lost laptop with client documents on it.

What we set up

Every covered computer gets security software that our team watches around the clock and can use to contain a threat. Web filtering, patching and security posture checks, such as whether disks are encrypted, run quietly alongside it.

For your accounts, identity and email protection works per user on Google Workspace or Microsoft 365. We watch for account takeover, including suspicious sign-ins, impossible travel and malicious inbox rules, and we respond by disabling access or ending sessions. Email security adds a second look for phishing and impersonation, and security awareness training gives your people short lessons and practice phishing emails.

Two add-ons often fit a brokerage. Cloud app log monitoring watches the activity logs of the cloud apps you list, and device backup keeps copies of computer files.

On departures, our part is to keep the list of protected users current when you tell us, within five business days. Closing the account itself stays with your administrator, and our monthly report and yearly review are a good prompt to check who still has access.

Where a mailbox belongs to a franchise or parent company, we cannot protect it, and we say so up front. Your office computers are still covered.

What it looks like day to day

Agents notice very little. The office manager hears from us about the monthly report, any recommendations and the yearly review. If something happens, one call or email reaches a real person who helps your team through it, and who can connect to a computer with your permission.

We send written security recommendations, and you choose whether to act on them. We do not sell with scare tactics, and no service can promise to stop every attack. The goal is to reduce your risk and catch trouble early.