Over the summer a wave of announcements about companies offering new infrastructures and forming new initiatives and the integration of these by major real estate companies were made. One such announcement came in August as Insignia Financial Group's subsidiary Douglas Elliman formed a joint venture with the Corcoran Group to develop a multiple listing system for Manhattan. The system would attempt to centralize the residential brokerage community through one Web site. Halstead Property Company also committed to becoming a member of the project. The MSL is scheduled to be up and open for new members in early 2001.

Insignia followed this announcement in late September with news that it was opening a retail business, through its Realty One group, that would act as an information center where customers could surf the Internet in a cyber café-like environment. The new virtual resource bank real estate office is in the warehouse district of Cleveland. The new office will serve as a testing ground for the prototype business and will spread across the country if successful.

Insignia Financial Group then announced that it was joining CB Richard Ellis, Jones Lang LaSalle and Trammell Crow Co. in Project Octane. Octane was launched in March as an alliance to further the development of an on-line service delivery platform that would supply procurement, transaction management and enterprise resource planning platforms. Octane plans to launch a transaction services platform within the first quarter of 2001. It will function as a hardware and software application service provider offering an Internet based marketplace, communication, collaboration and process management tool for the commercial real estate industry.