If you have tired of your $20 million cooperative apartment, and are thinking of selling, you certainly should call Elizabeth Stribling. After all, her firm handled 43% of all co-op sales above $15 million last year. Without a doubt, she knows the market, and she knows how to market.

For starters, Stribling & Associates will supply you with a helpful pamphlet on how to sell your home. Among other things, they recommend straightening up cluttered closets (or, at this level, having someone do it for you), adding strategically placed fresh flowers, and by all means eliminating offensive odors. These tips, and others concerning how to deal with a co-op board and the intricacies of the bidding process, are just the beginning of the services this firm will place at your disposal. Such attention to detail is their trademark.

Ms. Stribling is an elegantly coiffed and dressed woman who clearly pays attention to details. Her perfect posture and manners attest to her schooling at the proper Miss Hewitt’s in New York and her accent still carries a trace of her Atlanta origins. She seems at first meeting like someone likely to carry out her original life plan, which was to marry, live on Park Avenue, and raise her children.

As is so often the case, however, life intervened. Instead, Ms. Stribling finds herself the doyenne of high-end New York residential real estate, managing one of the largest firms in the business. She’s come a long way since joining Whitbread-Nolan in 1967 as a broker.

After thirteen years of learning the ropes, Ms. Stribling took her husband’s advice and launched her own firm. She started with eight brokers, seven of whose licenses she still holds. (The eighth, renegade Barbara Fox, started up her own company.) Today, Stribling & Associates has 185 brokers, working out of three town houses in different parts of the city.

Stribling was the first firm to have an uptown street-level office, near their primary client base. Upper East Siders quickly became accustomed to the arresting blow-up photos of beautiful apartments in Stribling’s windows, which could easily inspire a hunt for a new dwelling, or at least a call to one’s decorator.

The firm has broker affiliates in Provence and in Paris where, not so coincidentally, Ms. Stribling also has homes. These connections are not for show; recently, Stribling was instrumental in selling a Paris mansion to a Middle Eastern client; another vast property is available in Provence for just under $20 million.

How has this refined Vassar graduate ascended to the top of a tough, sharp-elbowed business? Certainly, in part, by adroitly fostering social connections. After all, co-ops are not sold like cans of soup. Not everyone can own one.

Especially today, when buyers are falling all over themselves to acquire ever-more-expensive homes, co-op boards are increasingly choosy and often intent on raising the social status of their buildings. It doesn’t hurt to know a few board members when the all-important vetting committee is about to meet and assess your client.

It helps, no doubt, that Ms. Stribling cuts a wide social swath. She is on the Women’s Committee of the Central Park Conservancy, and on the New York Landmarks Conservancy Board – both quite visible groups in the city – and also serves on the Real Estate Board of New York and several other industry associations.

She encourages her brokers to similarly engage in their communities – to join churches, synagogues, clubs or community associations, through which they can expand their circle of friends and acquaintances.

However important social connections may be, there is no substitute for professionalism. Ms. Stribling stresses the need for her employees to know the market, be persistent and honest, be a good listener, and a good negotiator. Apparently, Ms. Stribling herself is all of the above.

After a two-year “beauty pageant” competition, her firm was awarded the front-page marketing job for the Plaza Hotel condominium project. She is delighted with the opportunity, since the marketing arm of her firm, Stribling Marketing Associates, was founded only six years ago, and is one of her newer challenges.

The focal point these days, though, is a veritable tidal wave of high-end real estate activity in New York City. After a heady and exhausting first half of 2004, when sales finally topped the peak levels of 2000, the business calmed down as slowly rising interest rates put a lid on the frenzied market. Astonishingly, once the election was over, the market was off and running again. For the year, sales of co-ops priced above $4 million rose nearly 60%, to more than $1 billion.

In the first six months of 2004, 13 coops and five townhouses sold in New York for more than $10 million. By February of this year, there were already 16 coops and seven townhouses in contract over that price. Some transactions are breaking all records, such as the rumored $44 million price agreed to for the late Laurence Rockefeller’s Fifth Avenue apartment.

As Stribling’s “Luxury Market Report” issued in February points out, huge contemporary art sales and strong thoroughbred horse sales at Keeneland, Ky., both attest to the strength of luxury goods sales generally. In part, this strength may reflect the weakness of the dollar, which is enticing foreign buyers; partly, it is indicative of the enormous wealth that has been created over the past two decades in the financial markets.

Whatever the cause, Ms. Stribling does not envision the market collapsing, repeating some dismal days in the 1970s and 1980s. For one thing, New York is in much better shape – safer, cleaner, more appealing. Also, there are fewer new co-op conversions coming on to undermine the market.

Moreover, purchases are being made not for speculation, but for residences. The co-op market is also protected by boards that are careful to require adequate financial capacity on the part of the buyer. And the amount of financing allowed is quite limited.

Are there any bargains left? Perhaps not, but Ms. Stribling recommends the Upper East Side – especially the 80s and 90s along the far eastern avenues – as the most affordable niche in the market for a starter co-op. Try telling that to anyone under 40!

Reach Ms.Peek at Lpeek@nysun.com.