Digital Connections Rule... "Technology is the driver!" That's Ed McLaughlin, CEO of USI, introducing his PikeNet Forum presentation in Chicago earlier this month. Sequentra, developed by USI and independently available to other service providers, is the key to organizing USI's client relationships and now handles 25,000 properties and 300 million square feet. It's simply the way that USI does business.

Sven Pole outlined Trammell Crow's suite of client applications -- Procurement, Project Management, Portfolio Administration, Transaction Management, Work Order Management, and Accounting/Budgeting -- some developed internally and some developed in concert with other Project Octane. Integrating these tools into a customer's lifecycle is a continuous challenge as Trammell Crow and its clients search collaboratively for workflow efficiencies.

Jeff Finn, President of NAI, has long emphasized technology as a way to harness the power of his network and provide value-added services to clients. REALTrac™ Online, NAI's transaction management system, actually started as a dialup service twenty years ago to shorten deal cycle times. NAI's technology plan also involves generating more "Hot Prospects" through a centralized database and building NAI's brand identity.

As described by Sandra Sellani, Sperry Van Ness, which now operates in over 60 markets, subscribes to a unique business model. Each broker contracts separately with the company and pays many of his own expenses. So in a fundamental sense, the firm's clients are its brokers. Sperry Van Ness has built an extensive interface, Online Publisher, for agents to prepare marketing proposals and offering brochures -- a tool that would be totally beyond the reach of an individual producer. ... Wow, my brain is full. These paragraphs describe just a sliver of some incredibly complex initiatives to add more value to real estate services.

--Peter Pike