Small Business 101: How to Get Started

Alex Eben Meyer

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Take a good look at that store on the corner. There is a 10 percent to 12 percent chance it will not be there next year, according to the Office of Advocacy for the Small Business Administration.

“If you’re new you have about a 50-50 chance of surviving five years,” said Brian Headd, an economist with the Office of Advocacy, which tracks small businesses and examines the impact of proposed regulations on them.

Still, such odds do not seem to damp the desire of entrepreneurs.

An estimated 671,800 small businesses with employees opened their doors in 2005, the most recent year with statistics available, even as another 544,800 were expected to close theirs that year.

“Starting a business is actually easy. You can get business cards and an address at Mailboxes, etc.,” said Bill Morland, chairman of the Orange County chapter of Score, a nonprofit association that works with the S.B.A. to educate and assist entrepreneurs. “But you’re not really in business until you sell something, and that isn’t easy.”

Success comes with education, careful planning and adequate cash flow, specialists say. And it has never been easier to lay the groundwork for starting a small business. Many tools are available on the Internet and at libraries to aid aspiring entrepreneurs. Whole magazines are devoted to the subject.

But where to start? The Small Business Administration Web site is an excellent place to obtain information easily. It provides everything from details on characteristics important to run a business to information on writing a business plan to links to local centers offering assistance to start-ups.

The site’s “getting ready” section runs through a series of questions intended to help aspiring business owners gauge whether they have the qualities needed for the job: Are you a self-starter? Can you get along with different types of people? Are you risk-tolerant? Flexible and self-disciplined?

Need someone to hold your hand? Score, short for Service Corps of Retired Executives, has a network of more than 10,000 volunteers, working and retired executives, offering free guidance on the Web, through their offices across the country and at workshops. Small Business Development Centers, a partner of the S.B.A., also provide guidance at centers across the country.

Gillian Murphy, director of the San Joaquin Delta College Small Business Development Center, said she quizzed her clients about their reasons for going into business on their own.

“I tell them ‘I know you have something in your heart that’s telling you you’re going to be incredibly successful. My job is to get in your head and balance your head with your heart,’ ” Ms. Murphy said.

To do that she has them create a basic business plan, including a financial statement.

“Understanding the industry is key,” she said. “If someone is going to start a floral shop and they do a projected profit-and-loss statement and I don’t see spikes in February and May, they have no idea what they’re doing.”

Eunice Green, who owns a health food store in Stockton, Calif., turned to the development center at San Joaquin Delta College when she thought about buying a second store. With the help of the center, she took information on the types of customers at her existing store and did what Ms. Murphy calls “economic gardening.” After applying the demographics at various distances from the store, she decided against opening a second store.

“It’s kind of intuitive, but the S.B.D.C. gave me so many great concrete tools,” said Ms. Green, owner of Green’s Nutrition.

A number of online resources have also grown up in recent years geared to providing small-business owners with a wide range of information. They include sites like Work.com, which has more than 1,700 how-to segments covering a multitude of issues confronting small businesses; E-venturing, run by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation; and About.com’s small business and entrepreneurAbout.com.) sites. (The New York Times Company owns

StartupNation, a Web site founded by Rich and Jeff Sloan, offers advice through video segments augmented by written information and provides forums and groups where entrepreneurs can share information.

Other sites, like Bplans, owned and operated by Palo Alto Software, publisher of Business Plan Pro, have taken a more focused approach. Bplans offers more than 100 free sample business plans (more can be purchased) and they offer advice and other planning tools. When it comes to sorting through financial information, CCH Business Owner’s Toolkit has templates to help examine financial issues as well as other model business documents, checklists and government forms.

Still, any business or financial plan is only as good as the information it is built on. Finding that information may seem like a daunting task, but there are many free resources to turn to. A good first stop is the Census Bureau, which has detailed information in many areas including population, income and economic indicators for business. If the breadth of the Census Bureau’s information seems overwhelming, check out CensusScope, an Internet site that breaks demographic information down into manageable segments.

Another source of free statistical information online is FedStats, a site that provides a range of information produced by the federal government. And don’t forget you can still do your research the old-fashioned way by visiting a public library where a librarian will be able to provide a range of information, including industry publications.

The Library of Congress has compiled The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Small Business Information, a listing of books and directories helpful in establishing and running a business.

Ms. Murphy, who has been counseling small-business aspirants since 1989, says careful planning is essential to creating a successful business. Knowing the product, the market and the costs while having enough capital will go a long way toward getting through lean times.

“People who fail to plan have really not given themselves an opportunity to succeed,” she said.

¶ Tuesday, December 25, 2007 0 comments

Guidelines for Using a Cellphone Abroad

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As a T-Mobile subscriber, Ken Grunski, a businessman in San Diego, knew that his cellphone would work during a trip to Tanzania. What he did not expect was the bill: $800 for 10 days’ use.

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Illustration by Marc Mckenzie

“I didn’t think I was going to use my phone that much,” Mr. Grunski said. “But two to three 10-minute calls a day, and it adds up.”

What a shame that Mr. Grunski did not heed his own company’s advice. If he had, he would have saved himself a bundle.

Mr. Grunski owns Telestial, a company that sells SIM cards, small chips that replace those in cellphones sold by T-Mobile and Cingular and lower the costs of calls when overseas.

While his American phone worked abroad without one, Mr. Grunski was paying sky-high rates because he was roaming in a foreign country. T-Mobile charged him $5 a minute to roam in Tanzania.

If Mr. Grunski had used one of the SIM cards he sells, he would have paid $1.15 a minute to call the United States and his calls — averaging 16 minutes a day — would have cost him $184, rather than $800.

While Americans have embraced the convenience of using cellphones, trying to dial from overseas often brings surprises. Even if the phone works, voice mail may not. Depending on the handset, coverage can be spotty. Make the wrong choices, and you may find a huge bill.

The right tactics to avoid those headaches depend on which carrier you use, the length of your trip and your destination.

GSM vs. CDMA

A majority of the world’s cellphone subscribers — 82 percent — use the GSM technology standard, according to the GSM Association. In the United States, the major carriers use two systems. Cingular (now AT&T) and T-Mobile use GSM, while Sprint and Verizon use CDMA, an incompatible technology.

CDMA technology is found in North America, as well as some Asian countries, but it is basically nonexistent in Europe. As a result, Sprint and Verizon customers can use their phones in just 26 countries. (AT&T and T-Mobile customers can potentially use theirs in over a hundred.)

When traveling in non-CDMA countries, Sprint and Verizon customers can rent or purchase GSM phones from those providers. Sprint rents a Motorola Razr for $58 for the first week, and $70 for two weeks, plus $1.29 to $4.99 a minute of airtime. Verizon charges $3.99 a day to rent, plus $1.49 to $4.99 a minute. Verizon also sells three combo CDMA-GSM models, priced from $150 to $600 with a two-year contract.

Cingular and T-Mobile customers have more options — if their existing phones can pick up multiple frequencies. To complicate matters, the American GSM standard operates on 850 and 1,900 megahertz, while the rest of the GSM world uses 900 and 1,800 megahertz.

To use an American GSM cellphone in a foreign country, the handset you own must be tri-band or quad-band and able to operate on one or both of the frequencies used outside the United States. The Cingular and T-Mobile Web sites, as well as Telestial’s and others, list the predominant frequencies used in each country, and show if your phone can operate on one or both overseas bands.

To protect against fraud, American cellphones are typically blocked from making calls when used abroad. Before traveling, call your provider and ask to have that restriction removed.

A Temporary SIM Card

GSM phones use SIM cards (subscriber identity modules), tiny electronic chips that hold a cellphone’s “brains,” including the subscriber’s contact numbers and phone number. (CDMA phones store such information directly in the hardware.)

GSM customers can avoid sky-high roaming charges by replacing their American SIM cards with ones from other countries. For example, travelers to Britain can pick up a SIM card from the British carrier Vodafone; once inserted, it gives the phone a temporary British phone number. Calls within Britain and to the United States would be much cheaper.

For example, T-Mobile charges its customers 99 cents a minute for using their phones in Britain, whether calling a pub in London or your home in New Jersey.

Insert a prepaid British SIM card from a company like Telestial instead, and local calls drop to 26 cents a minute, while calls back to the United States cost 9 to 14 cents a minute.

Another benefit when using overseas SIM cards is that incoming calls are typically free in most countries.

Overseas SIM cards can be purchased before you travel from companies like Cellular Abroad (www.cellularabroad.com) and Telestial (www.telestial.com) or at local shops in foreign countries.

Unlocking the Phone

Even if you have a GSM phone that operates on both overseas frequencies, domestic cellphone providers do not want you to use your phone with another company’s SIM card, because they do not make any money when you do. To prevent your doing so, cellphones bought through Cingular and T-Mobile are electronically locked — they accept only their own company’s SIM cards.

Before you throw your phone off the Eiffel Tower in frustration, know that there are several ways to unlock your phone and avoid those high overseas roaming rates.

Cingular and T-Mobile will unlock their customers’ phones under certain conditions. Cingular will provide unlock codes to customers whose contracts have expired, who have canceled their service and paid an early termination fee, or who have paid a full rather than subsidized price for their phones, according to Rich Blasi, a Cingular Wireless spokesman.

T-Mobile has more lenient policies. It will provide the unlock code to any customer after 90 days of service, but no more than one unlock code will be provided every 90 days, said Graham Crow, a T-Mobile spokesman.

If you do not meet these requirements, you can still get your phone unlocked from a private company. For a few dollars, the Travel Insider (www.thetravelinsider.com) and UnlockTelecom (www.unlocktelecom.co.uk) will provide your phone’s specific unlocking code.

Other GSM Phones

Cellphone customers with dual-band GSM phones that cannot be used overseas can always purchase unlocked quad-band phones from third-party providers. These phones can be used solely when traveling outside the United States. Since they are unlocked, they can also be used instead of your current phone on your American network.

Because the phone is not subsidized by a carrier, the price is higher. For example, an unlocked quad-band Motorola Razr V3 can be bought for $140 from Cellular Blowout (www.cellular-blowout.com). Cellular Abroad and Telestial also sell unlocked phones.

A Few More Tips

When entering numbers in your phone, always add the plus (+) sign and the country code; that way, the number can be dialed automatically no matter from what country you are calling.

Store your GSM phone’s numbers in the phone itself, rather than the SIM card. Then the numbers will still be available to you when you use an overseas SIM card. To transfer them to a new phone easily, store them on a device like Backup-Pal (www.backup-pal.com), an external U.S.B. memory unit.

While you will not pay any charges for incoming calls when you use a foreign SIM card, tell your American callers to get an overseas calling plan from their phone company before you ask them to ring you. If they do not, they could be paying the same sky-high rates that you just avoided.

And if you take your American phone overseas, make sure that its battery charger is dual voltage; without one, all the effort to get your phone to work in other countries may go up in smoke the first time you plug it in.

¶ Thursday, March 15, 2007 0 comments

The Claim: The Back Seat of a Car Is the Safest Place to Sit

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THE FACTS Automobiles may not be the safest mode of transport, but many people wonder whether where they choose to sit can improve their odds.

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Leif Parsons

According to several studies, it can, and the spot that is generally the least desirable, it turns out, is also the safest: the middle of the back seat. Uncomfortable, yes, but it’s also the seat that typically has the largest “crush zone,” an area around which the car collapses in a collision, ultimately protecting an occupant.

One large study of the subject, by researchers at the University of Buffalo in 2006, analyzed more than 60,000 fatal crashes and found that passengers in the middle back seat were 86 percent more likely to survive than those in the front seats, and 25 percent more likely to survive than those in the other rear seats.

But the study also found that about half of all adults in the middle back seat neglected to wear seat belts. They were about three times as likely to die in a crash as middle-back-seat passengers who did buckle up. And not wearing a seat belt in the back can have unfortunate consequences for those up front. One study found that even when passengers in the front wore seat belts, their odds of dying were five times as great if those in the back were not belted, a result of back-seat passengers’ being thrown forward on impact.

THE BOTTOM LINE In an accident, the middle back seat is the safest place to be.

scitimes@nytimes.com

¶ Thursday, February 08, 2007 0 comments

When the Simple Solution Is the Right One

William Duke

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I had run way too far for my level of training, and I knew it. But I had gotten lost, and the fastest way back to my car was to run. The next day, my left forefoot hurt so much I could hardly walk, so I did just what you might expect — I checked the Internet to see what sort of injury I might have and what to do about it.

My search was frustrating and unhelpful. But I ended up getting just the advice I needed from an unexpected source. And I came away with this lesson: These days, when it is oh so easy to order sophisticated medical tests, sometimes the best test, and the best treatment, can be low-tech.

After I was hurt, I did just what doctors worry that their patients will do. I searched medical Web sites for a diagnosis I could accept. When I did not like the one I found, I tried to convince myself that it had to be wrong.

The Web diagnosis was a stress fracture, a hairline crack in a bone. It sounded bad. It could take months to heal. I might need to immobilize the entire foot and walk around on crutches and then go through weeks of rehabilitation.

I told myself that I didn’t have a stress fracture, that there were aspects of my injury that did not seem to fit. I kept running, four to six miles every other day. Still, I was not getting better.

Finally, in December, six weeks after the injury, I gave in and called one of the few orthopedists in my area who accepts my health insurance. The first available appointment was for Jan. 16. I took it.

Then I wrote about my injury, as part of a longer article for The New York Times about running while hurt. As soon as it appeared, on Jan. 11, I began getting e-mail from readers. A podiatrist told me that I definitely had a stress fracture and had better stop running. A trainer said I had injured a tendon attached to my big toe (he had no way of knowing that the injury was at the base of my third toe). And Paul A. April, a rheumatologist in Tulsa, Okla., said he thought it was either a stress fracture or something called extensor tendinitis. “I’d love to hear what the doctor finds,” he added.

I looked up extensor tendinitis online: an inflammation of a tendon that straightens the toe. I hadn’t found that injury when I first searched the Web, but it sounded right.

On Jan. 16, I finally saw the orthopedist and, of course, mentioned extensor tendinitis. All I got was a cursory exam and an X-ray. When the X-ray showed normal bone, the orthopedist said I needed an M.R.I. His office said someone would call me when my insurer approved it. Then I could schedule it. Then I could return to see the doctor and learn what the scan showed.

I e-mailed Dr. April in Oklahoma telling him what had happened. “Gratuitous advice may be worth nothing, but here goes,” he replied. “Hands-on examination should have revealed tenderness in the distal forefoot and even an increase in pain with forced downward pressure on the toes. If that was the case, then a local injection of a corticosteroid in a small amount with lidocaine or something similar into the extensor tendon sheath would produce relief of pain within minutes and hopefully this would last.”

That sounded great. I could rule out a stress fracture and cure the inflammation all at once. If that did not work, I did not have extensor tendinitis.

I called the orthopedist to see whether he would give an injection. All I could get was an assistant’s voicemail saying not to expect a reply for 48 hours because she was busy and, by the way, she does not work on Fridays. It was a Wednesday. (Thirteen days later, I still have not heard from her.) I also called my internist to see whether she would give an injection. The answer, her nurse said, was no.

Finally, I called an orthopedist who does not accept my insurance and asked whether he would inject cortisone into the tendon sheath of my foot. His assistant knew just what I was talking about.

“You want to rule out a stress fracture?” she asked.

The doctor would do it, for $277. I said that I would be there the next day and that I would pay.

The injection cured me. It also saved my insurer more than $1,000 for an M.R.I. and subsequent doctors’ appointments. But how much simpler to do what the Tulsa doctor recommended and the second orthopedist did: carefully examine my foot, ask about the injury, see that my symptoms seemed more like tendinitis than a stress fracture and simply give the injection.

As for Dr. April, my correspondent in Tulsa, he has learned something, too.

“The idea of telephone medicine seems to be an easy way to make a living if I were inclined to that,” he wrote. “In your case, I was intrigued by a simple problem, the solution of which seemed to be stalled. It really was no big deal, but I loved doing it.”

¶ Tuesday, January 30, 2007 0 comments

The Claim: Drinking Tea Reduces Stress.

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THE FACTS Some call it nature’s tranquilizer, able to smooth away stress and lift the spirits. But are the stress-reducing powers of tea fact or fiction?

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Although the association between tea and relaxation dates back centuries, few independent scientific studies have put that idea to the test. Much of the research has been focused only on animals. But a new study on humans suggests that it may hold only a sliver of truth.

The study was published this month in the journal Psychopharmacology and financed by the British Heart Foundation. It found that adult men who drank black tea four times a day for six weeks reacted no differently in the face of stress from men given a caffeinated placebo. But there was some indication that they were able to calm down more quickly.

The two groups in the study, consisting of about 75 men who were forced to give up their normal caffeinated beverages, were subjected to stressful social situations while their blood pressure, hormone levels and other indicators of stress were measured. All of the subjects showed the same substantial increases in those measures, with no positive effect on heart rate or blood pressure in the tea group. But those who drank tea had slightly lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol an hour later, suggesting that their levels of the hormone were returning to baseline sooner.

Whether that has any long-term benefit is unclear. Previous studies on animals have pointed to sedative effects of certain compounds in tea, but so far the evidence is weak.

THE BOTTOM LINE There is some evidence, but not much, that tea affects stress levels.

scitimes@nytimes.com

¶ Monday, January 29, 2007 0 comments

Agents of Angst

Illustration by Juliette Borda

RENÉE MIZRAHI suspects that the first real estate agent she worked with deliberately didn’t tell her that a building was only 49 percent owner-occupied.

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Related

The Choices Become Highly Personal (January 28, 2007)

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Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times

SOMETIMES, AN UNEASY PROCESS Jill Sloane of Halstead Property is Renée Mizrahi’s third broker.

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John Marshall Mantel for The New York Times

Rob and Lauren Mank, shown with their daughter, Sadie, now wonder why their agent, a buyers’ broker, pushed them to offer the full asking price.

Her bank subsequently refused to give her a mortgage, and she lost the apartment.

Her second broker was worse. He stood her up at an apartment showing, she said, and he lied about the building’s financial requirements and about having put in her bid for the co-op. Then when she told him that she didn’t want to work with him anymore, he kept calling her — she has caller ID — and hanging up without leaving a message. “So he was like stalking me,” Ms. Mizrahi said. “What a nightmare!”

She is now working with a broker, referred by a friend, with whom she feels comfortable, but her bad broker experiences have nonetheless made her wonder if any broker can really be trusted. “I just want to work with someone who shows up when they say they will and who will tell me the information I need,” she said. “Why is this so hard?”

Ms. Mizrahi is not alone in her hard-earned broker wariness.

A Harris poll conducted last year that ranked occupations in terms of prestige placed real estate brokers at the very bottom of a list of 23 professions. (Firefighters and doctors were at the top.)

Brokers themselves seem well aware that their business isn’t always held in very high regard. The National Association of Realtors has an advertising campaign called “Someone You Can Trust,” which stresses that Realtors are subject to mandatory ethics training. “Not many professionals can claim that on their résumé,” the ads read.

Svetlana Choi, a senior sales associate at Bellmarc Realty, estimated that at least a quarter of her clients are skeptical when they first come to her.

“I just try to draw them out and relate to them in a way that lets them know that I’m not the enemy,” she said. “I’m not trying to snow them. I’m really just trying to be helpful.”

So why do people often have trouble trusting a broker?

To start with, brokers are salespeople, so buyers with suspicious minds would naturally suspect brokers of trying to sell them something they don’t necessarily want or need. But brokers also admit that some real estate agents help to perpetuate stereotypes with classic bait-and-switch schemes and by putting their own desires to close a deal over a client’s best interests. The fact that brokers themselves sometimes find it hard to trust one another only compounds the level of suspicion in real estate.

There are two major sources of broker-to-broker mistrust. The first is the fear that one broker may be trying to poach another’s client. The second is that a seller’s broker may be deliberately avoiding phone calls or refusing to submit an offer because he or she wants to avoid having to share the commission. The cynicism may well stem from the fiercely competitive marketplace and the fact that there are more than 28,700 brokers and sales agents in Manhattan alone and 66,700 in all five boroughs.

Erik Serras, a sales agent at Pari Passu Realty in Manhattan, said another agent recently stood outside an open house that Mr. Serras was holding just to hand out his business card. “It was the equivalent of ambulance chasing, and it sheds a negative light on the industry on the whole,” he said. “There are just too many untrained agents out there doing things that are unethical and unprofessional, and once a client is exposed to that, the damage is done because it’s easy for people to generalize.”

Ann Rothman, a Bellmarc agent, said that some people were quick to judge brokers because they “just have a queasy feeling about real estate.” She added that she sometimes finds herself saying, “I do real estate, so yes, I sell used cars, and people are going to think the speedometer has been changed.”

But Ms. Rothman tries to be philosophical about it. “Any person in a service business is going to be up against that,” she said. “Even if you go to a doctor or a dentist, there are going to be people who think they’re only doing a procedure because they have their kid’s college education or a trip to finance.”

When she comes across skeptical clients, Ms. Rothman said, “I’ll bring it up, and I’ll say, ‘What’s the problem here?’ ” That seems to work, she added, citing as proof an entire family of doubting buyers. “They all have a distrust gene,” she said, “but they keep referring other family members to me.”

Another instance when a broker might appear to be evasive is at an open house. When brokers hold open houses, they represent the sellers, but they also routinely use the events as an opportunity to pick up other clients. So if a potential buyer walks in and doesn’t seem right for that particular apartment, the broker can offer to help the buyer find something else. But under the unwritten rules of the game, the broker does not have to disclose whether there are any other open houses in the same building, particularly if the events are being held by competing firms.

These kinds of situations can easily lead to mistrust on the part of sellers and buyers alike.

Managers at real estate agencies say that the only way to minimize misunderstandings is to train new agents to be highly professional and to establish and enforce industry standards. To that end, the Real Estate Board of New York has established a list of 17 resolutions aimed at addressing ethical questions in residential real estate.

The resolutions cover issues as basic as the definition of an “exclusive” and the need to have backup brokers available when the exclusive broker is not available. They also try to cut down on typical broker squabbles by declaring it improper to foist a business card on someone else’s client and asserting that brokers should give co-brokers and their customers at least 20 minutes’ grace time if they’re late for an appointment.

Diane Ramirez, the president of Halstead Property and a governor of the real estate board, said, “Some of these things may seem silly, but it creates a framework of proper decorum.”

The board and its policies have evolved to make it clearer that “we are an industry that works for our sellers and buyers, and that should be our primary goal,” Ms. Ramirez said. “That’s the only way to dispel the distrust that comes in, not because it’s earned but because of what our reputation may have been.”

The real estate board also has an ethics committee that handles complaints filed by brokers against other brokers. Stephen Kliegerman, Halstead’s executive director for development marketing and a former chairman of the ethics committee, said the committee handles only a handful of cases each year, but he added that most complaints do not get to the board because agency managers tend to resolve complaints among themselves.

One of the biggest current complaints involves brokers who post listings on their Web sites for the exclusive properties of other brokers. “They’ll advertise a property they don’t represent, or sometimes the property doesn’t even exist,” Mr. Kliegerman said. “So when the buyer calls, it’s a bait-and-switch — the broker knows nothing about the property and winds up trying to take them to something completely different.”

He said the ethics committee is developing a new resolution to deal with the problem. “This kind of thing happens daily, and it taints the consumer’s impression of the entire broker community,” he said.

Consumers can file complaints about real estate agents with the Department of State in New York, the Real Estate Commission in New Jersey and the Department of Consumer Protection in Connecticut.

The New York Department of State can punish agents for infractions ranging from practicing without a license to a catchall category labeled “untrustworthiness and incompetency.” The latter can include things like lying about the school district for a particular address or misleading a buyer about future development in the area.

If the number of complaints filed in New York in recent years is any indication, brokers may actually be becoming more trustworthy. From 2001 to 2005, the last year with complete statistics, the annual number of complaints declined from 1,589 to 1,176.

The complaint category that showed the sharpest drop and that accounts for most of the decline was in “agency disclosure,” indicating that real estate agents have gotten better at disclosing whether they are a seller’s broker or buyer’s broker and what that means in terms of where their loyalty lies.

Of the completed cases from 2005, 109 real estate agents were fined, 3 had their licenses suspended, and 14 had their licenses revoked. Fines can run as high as $1,000, and suspension periods are determined on a case-by-case basis.

But most ethical breaches probably never reach either the real estate board or the Department of State. Ms. Rothman of Bellmarc recalled a case in which she represented a buyer who made an all-cash, full-price offer on an apartment, only to have the seller’s agent stall and falsely claim that the sellers wanted time to consider the offer.

“I later found out that he was waiting for a customer of his own to make an offer and he never even told the sellers about my offer,” she said. She filed a complaint with the other agent’s manager, and her buyers eventually got the apartment.

When training new agents, larger real estate companies stress the need for proper broker etiquette, both with clients and with other brokers.

Vasco Da Silva, the director of sales at Halstead’s Riverdale office, says Halstead’s broker boot camp tells agents when they should keep their business cards in their pockets, advises them to turn off cellphones while showing an apartment and instructs them never to talk about an apartment inside an elevator if there are other people around.

“We go through a logical step-by-step process, and it’s all about winning a customer’s loyalty and trust,” he said. “You don’t get it with your first meeting, so what you have to do is win your customers over with service and with confidence in your ability.”

In its training, Bellmarc urges new agents to be as straightforward as possible and to avoid pushing an apartment on a reluctant customer. “If someone doesn’t want an apartment, you don’t want to try to talk them into it,” said Janice Silver, an executive vice president at Bellmarc. “You can’t say, ‘But it’s fabulous — here’s why you should buy it.’ ”

Instead, she trains agents to ask simple questions like: Do you like this apartment? Can you see yourself living here? Do you want to buy this?

“Don’t be pushy, but be very direct,” she said. “Because if they don’t like the apartment, you should move on and not waste everybody’s time.”

Some brokers say their colleagues should not try to hide a property’s blemishes. Jill Sloane, a senior vice president at Halstead who is Ms. Mizrahi’s new broker, said she once represented a seller whose apartment came with a 33 percent flip tax, and she made a point of including that in her advertising materials.

“There was no point in hiding something like that because buyers would eventually find out about it anyway,” she said. “It’s just not worth the damage it would do to your reputation to be deceptive.”

Patricia Warburg Cliff, a senior vice president of the Corcoran Group, agreed. “If I know that there’s a bus that idles under the living room window, I have to get it out first thing,” she said. “Because if a buyer finds out about it midway into a transaction, you have egg all over your face, and the seller isn’t served because they’re not out to swindle someone.”

Sometimes, even when a transaction provides a happy ending for everyone, a buyer can still be left with lingering doubts about the broker and his or her motives.

Take Rob and Lauren Mank, who are now happily living in an Upper West Side apartment they bought last year. Mr. Mank said they had no qualms about their agent, a buyers’ broker, until final negotiations, when she pushed them to offer the full asking price, which would have meant raising their bid by $45,000. They ultimately went up by $35,000 and got the apartment because two competing buyers did not raise their bids.

“I felt like it was very high pressure and her loyalty to us was compromised by her desire to do the deal,” he said. “It left us with a bad taste.”

But Ms. Mank said she didn’t believe there was any malice involved and noted that without a crystal ball, there is no way of knowing if they could have gotten the apartment for less.

“Maybe you’re always going to want to blame someone for some infraction because you’re always going to feel taken advantage of in some way,” she said. “It’s a delicate and intimate situation because it’s your home and it’s your finances — the whole thing is just so fraught.”

¶ Friday, January 26, 2007 0 comments