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This article discusses the high price of residential real estate in New York City. Many sellers are unwilling to negotiate for any price below their asking price even though the real estate market across the U.S. has been in a crisis mode. For the first three quarters of 2007, New York City properties sold for record prices and sellers are holding out because they believe foreign buyers and bankers who might receive bonuses could pay the high prices. Brokers believe that there is a stalemate between buyers and sellers.

From the real estate photos, the provenance of the Upper West Side pre-war co-op for sale is not readily apparent, but there are some clues. A child's bedroom is decorated with three framed transit maps. A spare bedroom converted to a den shows off a French dictionary, which would prove handy since the owner has a second home in France. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Renters and buyers who have used Matthew Berkson, a Citi Habitats real estate broker, marvel at his memory. He has near-total recall of information he picked up in conversations years ago, like what amenities a client does and does not need, what people do for a living and even, in one case, what a client's mother did for a living 30 years ago. That is because Mr. Berkson, a feverishly fast-talking 36-year-old Long Island native, keeps an extensive database of the 1,200 clients he has worked with, as well as the thousands of apartments he has visited and photographed over the past eight years. Each day, he enters detailed notes about his clients and scans in every document he receives, like tax returns and financial statements for co-op board and rental applications. Then he carries this information around on a hard drive in his briefcase. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Even in the strongest economies, New Yorkers of sound mind find that talking with a real estate broker can result in rolled eyes, raised voices and a New York version of ''taking it outside'' by threatening litigation. But now, as the sales market whimpers along in the languid last days of summer, some brokers say they have never been met by so many demands from their clients, or so much hostility. Victoria Shtainer, a Prudential Douglas Elliman broker, said one current client had asked her to arrive two hours before open houses to clean for her. Another client, a group of corporate executives from Texas, insisted on being driven around the city at various times for five weeks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When Michele Kleier wanted to sell a nine-room apartment at 1125 Park Avenue in 1977, her brokerage firm paid for a one-and-a-half-line classified newspaper advertisement that offered the rough location (''Park Ave. -- Low 90s'') and succinctly read ''Superb condition. Sun filled. Excel. maint.'' With that ad, she found a buyer willing to pay $145,000, today's inflationary equivalent of $522,000. This spring, when Ms. Kleier wanted to sell her 45th apartment in the same building, she invited 75 brokers to the eight-room apartment for an open house and seafood lunch catered by the Atlantic Grill restaurant. She featured the apartment on the HGTV television program ''Selling New York'' and paid to have the listing prominently displayed on several influential real estate Web sites. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Last year, when many Park Avenue real estate brokers were struggling to sell their co-ops, Vickie Palmos and her business partner helped sell 37 condos in Astoria, Queens, as if it were 2006. Ms. Palmos credits her success in part to the fact that she takes listings that other brokers sneer at because the properties suffer from real estate's greatest sin: bad location. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

New Yorkers have many definitions of hardship in these recessionary times: canceling cable, giving up taxis or eating more canned tuna fish. Then there are the hardships of city real estate developers. At a Tuesday meeting at the Board of Standards and Appeals, a lawyer, Gary R. Tarnoff, argued that his client, the Romanoff family, would face hardship if it could not get special permission to build a bigger office tower on its site next to the High Line, the long-awaited elevated park that has helped drive up real estate values in the meatpacking district. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Almost no segment of New York City's real estate industry was spared in the Madoff scandal, which may be history's largest Ponzi scheme: commercial brokers large and small, little-known developers and prominent families like the Wilpons and Rechlers all lost money to Bernard L. Madoff, industry executives say. The outsize impact on the industry may have resulted largely because Mr. Madoff (pronounced MAY-doff) managed his funds much the way that real estate leaders have operated successfully for decades: He provided little information and demanded a lot of trust. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Even though the national housing market is suffering and jobs on Wall Street are being lost every day, Manhattan real estate prices are higher now than they were a year ago. The average price of a Manhattan apartment rose slightly to $1.5 million in the third quarter of this year compared with the same period last year, propelled largely by a few purchases at the high end of the market, according to reports released yesterday by four large real estate brokerages. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]