Realtors in Saratoga Springs don’t need to know much about preparing coop board packages, and their counterparts in Manhattan need no working knowledge of the pitfalls of septic tanks. But since would-be residential real estate brokers get the same 45-hour state mandated course whether they plan to sell farmland outside Albany, tract houses in Syosset, or pre-war apartments on Park Avenue, city brokerage firms are stepping up their efforts to prepare their new sales people for the idiosyncrasies of the fast-paced Manhattan real estate market.

“At schools, they touch on co-ops, but they don’t break down the board process that consumes so much of our time,” a new sales associate at Halstead Property, Cynthia Lienert, said. Earlier this year, Ms. Lienert, 36, took part in Halstead’s recently developed two-week, 40-hour “Boot Camp,” to teach new Realtors city-specific lessons, like how to avoid the “land mines” – poorly written references, for example – that can derail co-op deals.

Before Halstead unveiled its Boot Camp last fall, in-house training had been up to individual division managers. “We wanted to standardize our efforts,” the company’s director of sales and leasing, Fritz Frigan, said. Mr. Frigan developed the curriculum, which comprises sessions on pricing city apartments and preparing board packages. “Our brokers need to know that there’s a whole science to understanding who is qualified to buy a cooperative, and a whole science to preparing the board package,” he said.

At the Corcoran Group, which recently opened a new training center on Park Avenue South, the director of education, Mary Jo McNally, gathers the “Corcoran Repertory Company,” a group of seasoned agents to role-play for new realtors potentially daunting broker-customer encounters. “Most people don’t like to disclose their financial picture,” Ms. McNally said. “It can be difficult for a new agent to ask, ‘How much liquid do you have in the band? Do you have any debt? How’s your credit?'”

Corcoran’s 70-hour, month long course includes lectures by city attorneys, mortgage brokers, accountants, and appraisers; and small-group training on Corco ran’s computer applications, Ms. McNally said. The seminar also stresses fairhousing laws, which in New York City shield housing applicants from discrimination based on occupation, citizenship, or their status as cross-dressers or transgender individuals – in addition to 10 other federal and state protections.

“What qualifies you to sell real estate anywhere in New York state, doesn’t really teach you what you need to know about selling in New York City,” the director of career development for Prudential Douglas Elliman, Corinne Pulitzer, said. “Of course the state mandates that you learn about selling a farm in Albany or Buffalo, but in New York, 85% of the residential market is cooperatives.”

In an effort to lure motivated brokers, the principals of Bellmarc Realty, Neil Binder and Marc Broxmeyer, inaugurated a famously demanding training program when they started the brokerage firm back in 1979.New salespeople must complete the materials on 16-instructional CD-ROMs, read four books, attend twice-weekly selling seminars, and pass two essay exams – a sample question: explain every clause in a standard sales contract – before they’re allowed to begin selling. “It’s the duty of the state to make sure the minimum legal requirements are met; it’s the duty of the firm to produce a great salesperson,” Mr. Binder, the author of “The Ultimate Guide to Buying and Selling Coops and Condos in New York City,” said.

A Bellmarc sales associate, Shema Bryan, 31, said the in-house training was “far more rigorous” than any of the license-qualifying coursework she completed last summer at New York University. Ms. Bryan said the training course dealt with the culture of selling city real estate in a way that the pre-licensing classes never did. “It taught us how to deal with different personalities – like the so-called ‘investment bankers’ who see things in terms of risk and return, or the ‘experts’ who think they know everything about Manhattan real estate,” she said.

Supplementary education is a matter of good business, a senior vice president of brokerage services of the Real Estate Board of New York, Eileen Spinola, said. “We live in New York City, in a very fast changing and sophisticated market, and it does not surprise me that firms are investing heavily in training their agents,” she said.