Boutiques band together to make voice heard.

Boutique firms are joining forces in order to face a predicted slowdown in the housing market of 2007.

"In 1979, the playing field was much more level; there were a handful of large, medium and small firms. Now the gap has widened on what we do and how we do it," said Suzanne Brose, president/ broker of downtown's Custom Brokers, who is quickly becoming known as the official spokesperson for downtown boutiques.

"We want to gather together boutique firms in a casual manner, not to exclude larger firms, but to understand their needs and our own."

With the downtown market currently one of the busiest in the city right now, it's not suprising that the local firms want to get organized.

But what is to be an informal assembly of boutique brokers is in fact a second effort to unite them. The first group was previously known as Independent Brokers, but is currently working on a new name because of concerns that even large firms have independent brokers. It has been in effect for about 3 1/2 years and has over 200 members.

United, the members can reduce costs on things such as office equipment and health insurance. "Part of our goal is to address the needs of small firms, which are clearly different from larger ones. It's so that [small firms] can exchange knowledge and information in hopes of helping to grow our businesses," said Deborah Borenstein, who sits on the Independent Brokers committee.

These groups come at an important time in the residential market which is generally viewed to be settling into a trough following a 2006 peak. "Right now, it's a more difficult market to make money in as a broker, and the more help you could get as a group is better," said Hans Ingram, vice president of RES Sales/Marketing, a small firm that's been around for about 4 1/2 years.

As opposed to larger corporations, boutiques have no budget for public relations that they can use to help sell their services, but size has little relevance when it comes to expert services, according to Diane Gordon, licensed real estate sales associate at Lamb Realty, who said brainstorming with other small firms can generate many ways to promote specialized local services. The growing number of home buyers and sellers using the Internet is also an issue the boutique firms have to grapple with. "Larger companies use a large amount of web traffic. It's important to try to group together to compete with bigger companies web traffic, because being easy and accessible can only benefit us. Working together to advertise would be better than if we work separately," said Ingram.

Many boutique owners believe that they specialize in people and property in a way that larger firms, through their sheer size, can't.

Said Gordon, "The larger market place often doesn't listen to what the consumer wants. There is a lack of quality service that a smaller firm is able to focus more clearly on. We have the flexibility to customize everything to the client's needs."