John F. Kennedy Jr. and his wife are lost at sea near Martha's Vineyard, while Nelson Mandela, the first black president of South Africa, steps down from leadership. The new single European currency is launched, while panic grows over global chaos as the time clock strikes 2000 at year’s end. The millennial anxiety over the supposed ‘Y2K’ bug is based on a meltdown of air-traffic control, banks, and power shutdowns. The century ends on a high note, as peace descends across the world with hundreds of thousands of people congregating in places such as Sydney Harbor, the Pyramids, Paris, London and New York to celebrate the new millennium.

Real Estate Overview
Following the real estate “dotcom” madness of the previous year, creating a new brand in real estate reaches new heights. Ideas are ridiculously expensive, frequently creative, and almost always amusing. ZipRealty introduces a new era of real estate company names as a home-based, lead generation start-up, HouseValues.com, quietly opens its doors in December 2004 after the dotcom crash, and turns heads when it raises almost $100 million in a successful IPO (NASDAQ: SOLD).

Back in traditional real estate, college hockey star Ronald Peltier consolidates nine prosperous real estate companies and propels the new corporate parent, HomeServices.com, to the No. 2 spot in sales in the US. Former C21 executive with Rick O’Neil revives 70’s Help-U-Sell. Widely perceived as a discount brokerage, the company is actually a full-service operation that allows customers to choose what they would like to pay for real estate services through unbundling. Congress finally completes the long-anticipated revocation of the Glass-Stegall Act, creating a furious debate on whether financial institutions may enter the industry as owners and operators of real estate firms.