Giller charges buyers £2,500 initially - mainly to discourage the property equivalent of tyre kickers (brick kickers?)

The second group of buyers are the "tire kickers," who haven't seen enough yet to make an offer.

Obviously this was deceptive; Joe could not possibly have liked all 13,000 tire kickers.

The tire kickers, the mom-and-pop business owners, they're not coming now.

Brokers do what they can to sniff out the "tire kickers," both at open houses and among those who want to see apartments by appointment.

First Boston then set to winnowing out the "tire kickers" -those shoppers who were clearly browsing, not buying.

"Not just tire kickers."

"On Sunday at the Winter Antiques Show, you usually get the tire kickers, but not at this fair," said Robert Kinnaman, a dealer.

"Our dealers have said there are fewer tire kickers, but the sales are still there," L. Ray Windecker, an analyst for the Ford Motor Company, said.

Consumer confidence may fill airplanes with vacationers and auto showrooms with tire kickers, but the money they spend is money they won't have for, say, college tuition or nursing homes.

While the Netscape Communications Corporation's Navigator was clearly the star of the show, a number of other Web browsers drew large crowds of gawkers and tire kickers.

It is the message behind the words he chooses, from his references to undecided voters as "tire kickers" to his promises, from the podium, to get to the next point "right quick."

Crisscrossing Westchester in a used S.U.V., and having his ads answered by what he calls "tire kickers," is not what Mr. Schneider intended at his age.

After the trip down memory lane, join other rubberneckers and tire kickers at the company's flagship dealership, a soaring crystal palace where you can check out the new CL-Class coupes and models not sold in the United States.

Corporate Tire Kickers Bell Atlantic and T.C.I. dispatched inspection teams - corporate tire kickers - to each other's empires less than a week after the deal was announced last fall.

Tire kickers, as nonbidders are known in the world of auto auctions, should have no difficulty getting a close look at the exotic machinery for sale, said Rick Carey, the auctions editor for Car Collector and Victory Lane magazines.

LIKE pilgrims to Mecca, car enthusiasts make a journey here each January for the Barrett-Jackson collector car auction, which over two decades has developed into the unofficial annual convention for old-car hobbyists as well as for celebrity watchers, sun worshipers and tire kickers.

"Not that there aren't tire kickers, good companies, looking around," Mr. Stanton said, "but they are not behaving with any urgency in a deteriorated business climate - and with great big companies, even when business actually begins to pick up, there is a long lag before that translates into action on real estate.