An online conferencing capability will be first out of the development pipeline. Within a month to 45 days, a platform will be launched for online contracts, including e-signatures that are being touted as legally, binding documents. And there are other changes coming for the Dallas-based business, Tom Bailey, CEO and president, tells GlobeSt.com.

The firm's trading symbol is changing as its IT strategy, which calls for acquiring 11 to 12 Internet-based companies in the next 12 to 13 months. Due diligence is under way with 150 such firms related to the commercial real estate industry. REpipeline is not looking at acquiring Zethus Inc., Realty IQ or a franchise with webrealestate.com, Bailey tells GlobeSt.com. REpipeline isn't interested in building or maintaining a database of fluid information, but only static, he emphasizes. The goal is to weed and sort the Internet operations that can be easily integrated into REpipeline's platform.

Within 60 days, appropriate SEC filings will be complete to open the door for a trading symbol change for its Sunnyvale, CA parent, Photonics Corp. "Once that is done, we will start the acquisition pieces," Bailey says. The buys are not to involve an exchange of cash, but rather stock.

The next step will be to take REpipeline to cities other than its Dallas test market. Bailey says the rollout order has yet to be determined, but it will be a city within reasonable traveling distance of the Dallas-Ft. Worth metroplex. It could be New Orleans, Kansas City or Houston for that matter. It won't be an undertaking as large as Los Angeles. Bailey is confident that once everything's in place, REpipeline will be able to realize its 32-city goal in 14 months.

REpipeline is on a carefully plotted course as its owners continue to take care in the services' rollout to ensure that all's working as it should. Bailey says that's been critical for REpipeline emergence in the online transaction arena. The firm had moved from beta testing to launch in Dallas in this first quarter.

The firm has just 150 subscribers in the DFW area. "It's not an all-out assault," Bailey says. "If our technology didn't work out, then there would be problems ... and all technology has bugs."

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