“It was a humiliating experience for me, something I’ll never forget; those snotty SOBs can all go to hell,” Stephen Wynn howled.

The reference is to a painful incident that happened a number of years ago, when Mr. Wynn, the creator of such world-famous Las Vegas hotels as the Mirage and the Bellagio and one of that city’s wealthiest individuals, bought an apartment – or so he thought – in one of Manhattan’s classier buildings. The sale never came to pass, as the building’s board rejected him, he felt, because of his association with gambling.

Actually, his turndown is not an isolated experience. Six months ago, during the peak of real estate fever, for those wanting to buy an apartment in Manhattan, board rejections – even if applicants had more than the needed financial muscle to ante up lofty and usually inflated asking prices – were as common as the air we breathe.

As one of the city’s leading real estate brokers, Elayne Reimer, explains it, many co-op boards at the time regarded their buildings as exclusive country clubs and often flatly rejected any would-be buyers who they felt didn’t meet their grand standards.

However, given the recent weakness in housing prices, that elitist approach is going by the boards, Ms. Reimer, one of the top performing brokers at realtor Coldwell Banker, says. “The snooty boards are just not as snooty as they used to be; the reason is, they can’t afford to be,” she says. “They’re now less independent and more flexible about prospective buyers.”

A year ago, she points out, boards would tell sellers not to be upset over the rejection of a buyer because, they claimed, an even higher sales price was just a month or two away. They were invariably correct, she says. That guarantee, she says, is valid no more.

“The news for the average person shopping for an apartment,” she says, “is your last name no longer has to be Rockefeller for entree into one of the city’s better buildings.”

One reason boards are becoming less rigid, she notes, is that it’s not good for a building’s image to have too many vacancies. Likewise, the boards don’t want to chance having budget problems by losing the transfer tax (a piece of the action their buildings get from the sale of an apartment). A decline in transfer taxes, Ms. Reimer says, can lead to higher maintenance charges and special assessments for a building’s residents.

Ms. Reimer, who sold the East Side apartment Mayor Giuliani occupied when he wasn’t living at Gracie Mansion because of his marital woes, pointed to three of her recent sales of two bedroom East Side apartments. She said the boards had rejected the buyers and the apartments subsequently sold at lower prices. One had an original asking price of $1.48 million; it later went for $1.35 million. Another, originally pegged at $979,000, sold at $899,000. A third, which carried an original asking price of $650,000, sold at $599,000.

Despite the current slowing sales, a trend, Ms. Reimer says, that began in August, she sees little likelihood that the bubble will burst. More likely, she says, it will be a trickling down of sales. What’s more, she says she thinks prices may well stabilize around the end of the year, spurred by the traditional holiday bonuses.

Based on her sales activity, Ms. Reimer reckons that decreases in apartment prices – which she estimates are down by an average 10% since August – “are now an across-the-board occurrence every day of the week.” By the same token, she notes that while sales are much slower than last year, they’re a bit better than a month ago.

Meanwhile, she adds, both buyers and sellers seem nervous and in a quandary. The buyers, she points out, see prices going down and don’t know whether to buy now or wait for a better deal. The sellers, on the other hand, look at the falling prices and wonder whether they should pull their apartments off the market in hopes of a rebound at a later date. “It seems right now we’re in a state of the unknown,” Ms. Reimer says.

If you’re one of those apartment seekers, our broker says she thinks it behooves you to be especially wary of downtown Manhattan, notably SoHo and the Lower East Side. Pointing to the many purchases of condos in high-rise buildings, in particular speculative buying by the younger generation at practically no money down (such as 90% mortgages), Ms. Reimer cautions that downtown will certainly be the most vulnerable area in the event of any serious housing downturn.