The island of Manhattan is the heart of New York City. And though we love it, this island could be, well . . . bigger. About 2,000,000 people reside in our slice of the Big Apple, which only measures 23 square miles in size. The tight fit leads to a highly competitive real estate market.

Manhattan's coops, condos, and townhouses are some of the country's most expensive properties. Typical 2-bedroom apartments go for $300,000, on average, and 4-bedroom apartments frequently sell in excess of $1,500,000.

This How to Buy guide will acquaint you with the ins and outs of Manhattan's Buyer's market. We'll cover the traditional methods of finding and buying Manhattan apartments and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using brokers and online apartment services like MLX.

Traditionally, options available to Buyers and Sellers in the Manhattan real estate market have been slim. Until the advent of the Internet, using a broker was the easiest way to view, locate, and buy new apartments. This has been true despite no state law requiring brokers to be involved in real estate transactions. However, for various reasons, brokers are not always the best option.

Competition Between Brokers Puts Buyers at a Disadvantage

In most major cities, brokers pool their apartment listings in a regulated service called a Multiple Listing Service, or MLS. Not so in New York. Here, brokers compete and maintain separate, independent apartment listings and only share them selectively. This puts Buyers at a disadvantage as they are forced to evaluate a large market in small fragments, on almost a broker-by-broker basis. With fewer options, it makes searching for all available apartments in Manhattan almost impossible.

How Window Shoppers Increase The Serious Buyers' Costs

Under the current brokerage system, casual, recreational buyers--or browsers--put serious Buyers at a disadvantage. They utilize and overburden a limited pool of broker resources. Since large numbers of non-serious buyers "window shop" with brokers at no cost, brokers have to increase their fees to recoup their time and business expenses. Buyers who do consummate deals with brokers end up covering those costs.

Until now, there were four basic methods of finding an apartment in Manhattan: Going it alone (door-to-door research), word-of-mouth, classified ads placed by apartment owners and real-estate brokers.

The most common route was to use a real estate broker. Should you choose this path, there are two guidlines to follow:

Remember Brokers Represent Sellers, not Buyers. Because brokers provide a point of reference for the Buyer, help clarify the Buyer's likes and dislikes, and organize the Buyer's apartment viewing schedule, Buyers sometimes develop the sense that they are the broker's client.

However, it is important to remember that the Seller, not the Buyer, is the broker's client. The Seller, therefore, commands the broker's first loyalty. It is also the Seller who pays the broker's commission. To ensure you get the most from your contact with brokers, Buyers should work with several brokers, each of whom should maintain a different database of apartment listings.

So-called "Misleading" ads. Often a Buyer, who responds to an inviting newspaper ad placed by a broker, ends up viewing a very different apartment from the one advertized. This can be very frustrating.

In many cases, such is the pace of the real estate market in Manhattan, the apartment is sold by the time an advertisement appears in the newspaper. On other occasions, the ad may be a "generic" example of what a broker usually has for sale and not an actual apartment.

On the rare, though highly annoying occasion, the ad functions as a decoy to persuade the Buyer to view other possible apartments. Beware the latter. These unethical brokers give everyone in Manhattan real-estate a bad name.

As we've mentioned, there have been few apartment search methods traditionally available to Manhattanites. With the growth of the Internet, new ways of doing business have evolved in every industry--including real estate.

Better Service. MLX is engineered to give consumers the easiest, most comprehensive access to available Manhattan apartments. Our full-time staff updates our listings database seven days a week and it is accessible online, via fax and via e-mail.

More Listings. Imagine combining the resources of hundreds of the brokers, management companies, and apartment owners in Manhattan, then organizing them in an easy-to-use database for one low fee. Well, that's what we've done. MLX lists apartments from three major sources: apartment owners, management companies, and brokers. This means that some of our listings are no-fee apartments and some are not. It also means that MLX Insiders access a database several times larger than that of any broker, owner, or management company alone.

Individual Customization. We'll only show you what you want to see. We don't post misleading ads, and we aren't biased toward anyone but our customers. MLX Insiders choose how they want to conduct their apartment searches--with a broker or on their own--and we arm them with the information they need to ensure success. MLX Insiders follow the apartment, not the broker.

More Competitive. MLX makes you--the Buyer--more competitive. We save you time by organizing your possibilities and we save you money by helping you avoid broker commissions and inflated apartment costs. And we can educate you. By becoming MLX Insiders, casual, non-serious buyers turn into serious Buyers, thereby lowering everyone's costs. With fewer casual buyers cluttering the market, more apartment owners have the time to show property themselves, which helps Buyers and Sellers negotiate a better price. With MLX-educated Buyers on the market, everyone will spend less time viewing apartments, and more time making deals.

Tips for Making the Sale Go More Smoothly