I have been so busy these past couple of weeks tying up a couple of rentals that I worried I’d been neglecting my sale. However, I know my seller is getting antsy as July — and vacations with their consequent disappearance of buyers to the beach — looms. So I decided to set up an open house for this weekend, and to make it a big one.

Now I have to digress for a minute and tell you that the deal du jour in my area — downtown — actually happened as the result of a mistake. An agent accidentally typed the wrong price on a listing and the result of the underpricing was a fierce bidding war and a terrific final price. Crazy, huh? Well, that’s what this market is like.

My seller and I are happy with our pricing — we’ve seen offers that we like — but prospective buyers have not gone to contract so I am now looking for someone with a lot of desire and no problems getting financing. After careful consideration, it seemed like the best strategy was to stop paying attention to marketing directly to the customer — MLS listings and advertising and such — and to start paying attention to marketing directly to other brokers.

So I went in to the office this afternoon with the goal of sending my open house flier to the 50 agents in New York who would be most likely to have my customer, and to send it to them in such a way that they’d be most likely to read it. (We have a service that sends out e-mail fliers in bulk, so I figured the broker population as a whole would be covered.)

The superstars were easy, because they are names that I hear over and over again in the course of my business. But after e-mailing those top four giants I was stuck. Who, I wondered, are the other 46 people I should market to? So I started in on the firms that have offices near my listing, figuring they’d be the most likely to be seen as specialists in the area.

There are two firms that seemed obvious — Sotheby’s and Brown Harris Stevens — since they both have perfectly located offices. I decided to get my flier to five agents per firm, and I spent some time scouring the lists of agents per office to try and figure out who might at least recognize my name and open my e-mail.

Alison Rogers is a licensed salesperson and author of "Diary of a Real Estate Rookie."

***

What’s your opinion? Leave your comments below or send a letter to the editor. To contact the writer, click the byline at the top of the story.

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