Do you know who your customers are?

I know that sounds like something a motivational speaker might say, but don't dismiss it purely on those grounds. If you are selling, it helps to have a strong grip on who you are selling to.

I often joke about my clientele being "busy millionaires and poor journalists," but that really is my focus. I love renters, because they're usually fast money, and they grow up to be buyers.  more...

My husband and I just celebrated our second anniversary. To be fair to myself, I didn't actually lie on the floor and kick and scream until my face turned blue.

I did, however, break a promise to him.

"We're going over to the East Side to watch the fireworks," he had said. "This is a friend borrowing a banker's pied-à-terre, so you have to promise me that you won't throw a fit out of real estate envy."

"I promise," I had said.  more...

A little head-scratcher for the Fourth of July: It seems odd, in the New York City of 2007, to think about Fair Housing. Everyone is priced out of Manhattan apartments, black, brown and white alike, and it is tough to imagine that, if a purple customer came falling out of the heavens with a suitcase full of cash, brokers wouldn't trip all over themselves to serve him.

But we didn't always live in today's utopia, where the majority is color-blinded by greed. A mere generation ago, people experienced housing discrimination based on the color of their skin.  more...

I have a client who has been on the verge of buying since February. We have looked at a lot of properties we liked, and made two below-market offers, but listing prices are expensive and nothing he has seen has set his hair on fire to pay list. We are looking at rentals tomorrow, and that may be that, but it does raise the question here: are we slowing down?

Is it certainly a question I get asked elsewhere, whenever I do radio tapings to flog my book, because expert hosts in other cities have already seen a slowing. Sometimes, as in D.C. or Florida, it's been a painful one.  more...

I hate shopping. First of all, I help other people shop for the perfect home for a living, so when I'm done the style muscles are tuckered out and don't want to be called upon any more. Second, there's never a good time to do it: when I have just had a closing and I have money in my pocket, I am fired up about my business and don't have any time; when I am between closings and watching my checkbook balance dwindle, I am reluctant to let go of the money.  more...

It felt like the closing to end all closings: my first book came out this week.

I started working as a reporter when I was in my 20s. More properly, I started working as a fact-checker: other people would write the articles, and I would call the sources who had been quoted and make sure there weren't any screw-ups.  more...

Lately, I have customers who want to buy new, new, new, but they're also going into budgetary shock. I have one particular set of clients, a family, who are having trouble finding their dream home -- they want to be downtown, which is popular, in a top school district, and they want a three-bedroom that is around 2,000 square feet. To get all that with a sparkling new kitchen, too, would bust their budget, since all the available candidates are north of $3 million.  more...

10013, as I pointed out to residents in my last direct-mail piece, is the most expensive ZIP code in New York City. The price per square foot, according to Miller Samuel appraisers: $1,346. It's Tribeca, and the neighborhood combines urban grit with some hipster charm (the iconic resident may be Christy Turlington, supermodel/yoga lifestyle guru/savvy business executive/mother of two); there are fashionable restaurants, and a decent, though shockingly overcrowded, public school.

So of course I want to get my newest clients down there.  more...

I have spent two days running around with a relocating renter and I am tired. Relos are hard, because in the quest to find them the neighborhood that "fits" you end up showing them every single possible area -- usually on foot. We saw the Financial District, we saw Battery Park City, we saw Union Square and Chelsea and Midtown. We saw Greenwich Village, twice, and I waved at Chinatown because there's nothing good there now, but it's where my last renter ended up.  more...

I, Alison Rogers, am not smarter than a fifth-grader.

I know this because I was watching the Fox network game show while I was making dinner (rice and beans) and I flunked the one-million-dollar question: "What was the name of the first U.S.-launched satellite?"

To be fair, the show is set up so you can take the money and run at the half-million-dollar mark, and I certainly would have quit right then and there. I know what I don't know.

And to be even more fair, the show's actual fifth-graders aren't smarter than fifth-graders either.  more...

To start things off, I have a little quiz. It is written from a girl's point of view, so guys, just bear with me.

1) It is Sunday morning. You are running out to preview a condo for a buyer client on a day when you are also holding an open house, and possibly meeting the buyer client in the afternoon.  more...

Like many newlyweds, I feel as though I have very few close friends. The wonderful intimacy of sharing every day's sorrows and joys with the same person, while simultaneously trying to get dinner on the table and not stab him with whatever sharp object might be at hand, tends to crowd a lot of things out. (Plus, to be fair, I am not that easy to live with, so I spend some time trying to dodge the sharp objects that are near at hand to him).

Anyway, I have only three or four people with whom I am really close, so it is rare that I have to run to someone's side within minutes.  more...

I didn't show any properties last weekend, because it rained.

And rained and rained. The downpour was historic; the weatherman said that if it had been just a little bit colder, we would have gotten snow instead, and we would have gotten six feet of it!

So anyway, hubby and I stocked up our cupboards and we stayed in and cooked. The week, we figured, could start on Monday.

But it turned out to be a pretty good week.  more...

One of the reasons I wanted to be a Realtor is that I'm fairly social, and I enjoy being around other people. The difficulty is that I'm not sure I like them.

Oh sure, other people are perfectly lovely to sit down and have a lunch with. But in a work context, they don't always do what I would do, which makes me nutso. In this, I am my mother's child – she was a southern judge famous for her way or the highway. (In nice polite southern terms, my momma didn't suffer fools gladly).  more...

I have been a part-time agent for nearly a year now, but I still write a lot. For one thing, it provides a dribble of steady income; for another, it's in my blood. I had been a reporter for nearly two decades when I started showing houses, and I still have an ingrained tendency to ask questions like a reporter. And I love writing; sometimes when I don't know what I think about something or how I feel about it, I'll start writing and the answer will simply come out. Maybe a musician experiences the same sense of peace sitting down at the piano, I don't know.  more...