James Pickrel, a senior analyst at Hambrecht & Quist, has dubbed this new paradigm "dynamic hosting," and he predicts that it will grow to a $6.6 billion market by 2003. "Dynamic hosting refers to destination Web sites that provide focused software, content, and services to a defined community of users," he says. "It offers a complete business infrastructure."

Pickrel distinguishes such sites from portals, which typically provide access to related content only, rather than applications and integrated services.

A prime example of this type of online resource aggregation is iProperty.com Inc., which provides online services to the real-estate industry. These services include property listings, mortgage shopping, and tools for managing the home-purchase process from bid to closing. IProperty.com pulls together these disparate services and offers them on an aggregated basis to real-estate agents.

One distinguishing feature of iProperty.com is that it lets the agents--not, in general, a technically savvy group--create Web pages that provide this complete service-aggregation mix to their customers. Real-estate agents working for a company that subscribes to iProperty.com's service can give customers their own personal Web address, where they can browse for suitable homes, evaluate financing deals, obtain title insurance, and even contract for ancillary services such as moving and housecleaning.

"What this does is put the agent back at the center of the entire home-buying process," says Tracee Lutes, an associate with F.C. Tucker Co., a $2 billion real-estate broker in Bloomington, Ind. Because the customized customer sites that Lutes creates using the iProperty.com service aggregates everything her customers need, she's able to maintain strong branding throughout the home-buying process. "They see my smiling face on their PCs every day," she jokes. Just as important is the fact that customers execute all their searches and messages at the site, letting Lutes track every action they take--a key capability in a business where customer retention is a major challenge.

IProperty.com built its aggregation system using a dynamic hosting platform from Bowstreet.com Inc., which provides an Extensible Markup Language infrastructure for aggregating Web services and content, including ASPs. Bowstreet also offers a service portal where dot-coms and other businesses can shop for online services that might make an attractive ingredient in an aggregated services recipe.

"We make it easy for businesses to quickly offer and consume multiple Web-based services," says Bowstreet.com co-founder Jack Serfass. "By providing a means of rapidly scaling business relationships over the Web, this type of aggregation enables companies to sell all kinds of services that wouldn't otherwise be possible."