Post acquisition of Insignia, CBRE's Tri-State region totals 1,000 employees, including 600 brokers generating a huge amount of market intelligence every day. It's exactly this scale that Hipschman believes will enable CBRE to build its own grid of information services. So for the past four months, Hipschman and his team have been integrating the best elements of CBRE's and Insignia's systems. According to Hipschman, "We're done. Now we're building."

The core of CBRE's system is PropertyView, which features four major components -- listings, property data, comparables and tenant information. Fed daily by its own network of "content coordinators," Tri-State Today publishes the latest deals, listings and local news online for CBRE Tri-State professionals. And CBRE is building a wireless capability based on Good Technology to make all this information accessible to mobile professionals.

For years my friend Hipschman has argued that it's a huge waste of time for brokers to blast each other with e-mail announcements (much less, paper fliers!) about new listings. It's just not an efficient way to process information. Hipschman is now working on a way to send e-mail with XML tags so that new data can be automatically added to a database. He hopes that CBRE's scale in the Tri-State area will create the critical mass necessary to promote widespread adoption of the system. "We want to lead by example."

Summer Break... The Dispatch will go dark for two weeks. Hey, I'm off the grid. Look for the next issue on September 9. Thank you!

--Peter Pike