The one-bedroom condo on Park Avenue was described by the broker, Jeffrey Tanenbaum of Halstead Property, as a “hoarder’s paradise, with seven cats, one dog and 12 armoires packed to the brim.”

Closets were on the verge of bursting, and the owner’s bed was heaped with mounds of clothes. Floors had buckled, and paint had peeled from the walls. The owner’s husband had died unexpectedly, and financial problems had forced her to put the apartment on the market.

“When I arrived for our first meeting,” Mr. Tanenbaum said, “I got the shock of my life. But the light, the views and the location were incredible.” Light streamed so powerfully through a wall of windows “that you really needed sunglasses in the afternoon.” A major selling point was the sweeping 600-square-foot terrace with three exposures.

Deeply moved by the plight of the owner — “my heart really went out to her” — Mr. Tanenbaum set to work.

He rented a storage space for the contents of the apartment, and paid his own housekeeper to scrub down the premises. The online listing featured only a floor plan, a photograph of the lushly planted terrace, “and careful language to mention that the apartment had great bones,” he said. The space was shown 30 times and received 9 offers; in June, after a bidding war, it sold for about the asking price, just over $1 million.

Real estate brokers are expected to play an active role in the buying and selling of a home. They help set the purchase price and guide their clients through bidding wars and co-op board applications. But these days, some brokers are finding themselves in new territory, shepherding the sale of a hoarder’s home.

With inventory so low, almost any new listing gets waves of attention, and even the overflowing homes of hoarders are catnip to buyers. Yet selling these properties is different from most transactions: Brokers must restrain themselves from the push-and-pull that typifies most sales. Tact, restraint and sensitivity are the relevant qualities. With many properties, possessions have accumulated to such an extent that simply setting foot inside is a challenge.

Hoarding is a complex emotional disorder defined as a fierce need to acquire combined with a paralyzing inability to get rid of things. The Collyer brothers, perhaps the best known example of hoarders, died in their impassable New York house in 1947. An estimated 3 to 5 percent of Americans suffer from the condition, which in May was listed for the first time as a distinct disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Although not confined to the elderly, the problems associated with hoarding intensify with age. And in a crowded metropolis, these troublesome spaces can seem uncomfortably close, which is why co-op boards sometimes force the issue and order a sale.

Owners of such apartments are reluctant to discuss their situations, aware that the label of hoarder invariably carries a stigma. Some are aware that the state of their living space has spiraled out of control. Others are in denial.

But whatever term is used to describe occupants of overly cluttered spaces, emptying one out can be wrenching, as Mimi Turque Marre discovered recently in tossing decades’ worth of possessions in the two-bedroom prewar on the Upper West Side where she had lived for 40 years. Contents included a closet filled with her father’s vintage 78s and furnishings from her late husband’s childhood home, including the kitchen table where he sat as a boy.

“I gave away things I never thought I would part with,” said Ms. Turque Marre, an actress whose Broadway credits include “Man of La Mancha” and “Fiddler on the Roof,” who put her apartment on the market earlier this year. Ms. Turque Marre does not describe herself as a hoarder, but she acknowledges that she has a tendency to hang onto things that matter to her. “If you’re me, things have histories,” she said. “I can get sentimentally attached to a dust ball if it hangs around long enough.”

Because inventory is tight, even though the apartment had not been fully emptied, it sold within a few days.

For brokers, showing and marketing a true hoarder property can require considerable creativity. Some spaces are firetraps and home to bugs or worse, with rooms so jampacked that visitors must navigate sliver-thin passages simply to move from one to another. Online visuals present a special challenge; a broker might display a floor plan, a view out a window or another apartment on the same line.

And forget the open house. Sometimes prospective buyers can’t get past the front door. Buyers must also be encouraged to picture the rosy possibilities that await them once the junk has been carted away and the contractors have worked their magic. As brokers invariably recommend, “Close your eyes and pretend.”

The possibilities are considerable, because many of these spaces are trophy homes or used to be. “Some of the best addresses in New York City have hoarders in them,” said Harold Kobner of Argo Real Estate, who last winter sold a Classic 7 owned by a hoarder on the Upper West Side. Despite the legal and financial tangles that often complicate such sales, these properties spark bidding wars and attract dozens of potential buyers, some making all-cash offers well above the asking price.

“Right now people are starving for anything,” said Mark D. Friedman, a Halstead broker who sold his first hoarder apartment, home to three dogs, eight cats and “not a speck of ground without something on it” eight years ago. “They’ll look past a lot to see the bones of a place.”

Robin Plevener, a Citi Habitats broker, discovered both the challenges and the rewards of selling a hoarder’s apartment last year when she sold a two-bedroom on East 86th Street, home since the 1950s to a quilter unable to discard so much as a scrap of fabric.

“It was a fabulous building with a strict board,” Ms. Plevener said, “but the apartment was literally overflowing with hundreds of pounds of material that the owner used for her work.” Dozens of full-size quilts were stashed in the bedroom. The dining table was buried beneath acres of silk, satin and calico. The five walk-in closets were packed so full that their doors hadn’t been shut in years. The door to the room used as a studio had to be kept closed, for fear the owner’s cats would get lost in the clutter.

“The owner couldn’t have had more furniture if she’d owned a store,” said Ms. Plevener, who showed only the floor plan and the building’s handsome exterior on the Citi Habitats Web site. “If the apartment had been empty, it would have sold in a minute, but people couldn’t see beyond the clutter. When I first saw it, I thought, ‘Oh, my God, she’s never going to get her money’s worth.’ ”

Gently, because the seller was an acquaintance, Ms. Plevener tried to coax her into digging out. “But even after she got rid of dozens of garbage bags of stuff, you couldn’t see a difference.” To Ms. Plevener’s further dismay, many of the dozens of visitors made disparaging comments as they poked about the place, even when the owner was present. “I said, ‘Please don’t. A person lives here, and you have to respect her.’ ”

“She wasn’t nuts: she just couldn’t throw anything away,” Ms. Plevener said. “Living like that was her comfort zone.”

The property went on the market in April 2012, with an asking price slightly under $800,000, and an offer arrived the following month. The deal fell through a few weeks later, but a second buyer, Dr. Andrew Schreiner, promptly fell in love with the apartment and bought it for about $50,000 less than the asking price, charmed by the layout, the price and the building’s reputation.

“Because there had been a previous potential buyer, I didn’t see the apartment at its worst,” said Dr. Schreiner, a pathologist at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, who closed on the property last October. “You could tell when you walked in that the place had been tidied up. But it was definitely overcrowded.”

Dr. Schreiner’s greatest fear was that decades of neglect had permanently damaged the walls and the original parquet floors. It hadn’t, but when the old carpeting was ripped up, clouds of dust flew into the air. “I was a bit worried about what I’d find,” he said, and in fact, before he could move in, every surface had to be redone.

Dr. Schreiner also had more metaphysical concerns.

“There was a kind of spooky, time-capsule feeling,” he said. “When I saw the apartment, I thought to myself: someone’s entire history is overflowing here, and you feel as if you’re intruding. An apartment like this also makes you think about yourself. You wonder, could I myself fall off the deep end?” He describes himself as a neat enough person, but still he wonders.

With hoarder apartments increasing as New York City’s population ages, co-op boards typically do everything they can to expedite their sale. Sometimes the problems are so great that the board gets a court order mandating the sale of an apartment to protect other residents from potential dangers like fire and vermin.

“When the apartment of a hoarder is sold, the board is the happiest guy in the room,” said Aaron Shmulewitz, a partner of Belkin Burden Wenig & Goldman who has helped many a co-op and condominium board deal with problem homes. “Generally, a longstanding health problem is being resolved, and boards usually bend over backward to expedite the sale. If the potential buyer is on the cusp of fiscal responsibility, the board will try to approve that person, just to get the hoarder out of the building.”

Showing these properties requires considerable ingenuity, as Eileen Richter, a Brown Harris Stevens broker, discovered when she prepared to sell a stunningly overstuffed Park Slope brownstone. Online, the property was described as a “handyman’s fixer-upper,” and praised for its great bones and terrific location.

But the accompanying image, a chocolaty brownstone facade framed by leafy branches and dappled sunlight, should have been a tip-off. When this onetime showplace went on the market, posting photographs of the interior was out of the question.

“My jaw hit the floor,” said Ms. Richter, who sold the house with her Brown Harris Stevens colleague Audrey Edwards. “I had literally never seen anything like it in my life. Every room was packed. Every surface was heaped with papers and computers. Clothes were piled halfway up the walls, and there was so much stuff shoved against the door leading to the backyard that you couldn’t even open it. What made the whole thing more amazing is that the household included two young children.”

The open house was held on a bright day in February 2008, Ms. Richter recalled. “I remember telling Audrey: ‘We can’t let kids in. It’s not safe.’ We had to tell prospective buyers that we could only let two or three adults in at a time.”

Not that the owner, who Ms. Richter said had lived in the house for decades, expressed any chagrin about the state of the premises. “He wasn’t apologetic,” Ms. Richter said. “His vision of where he was living was very different from ours. At least with estate sales, the owners are deceased and you can get the stuff out. But this owner was here, and he thought he lived in a fabulous house.”

Despite the challenges, the sale proceeded with lightning speed. Two weeks after the house went on the market with an asking price of about $1.3 million, the buyers signed a contract for slightly above that figure.

Even after a deal is struck, the closing may be a distant goal, as Mr. Kobner of Argo learned in selling the Upper West Side Classic 7, a down-at-the-heels beauty whose assets included a formal dining room, a maid’s room, seven closets and 270-degree exposures. What the listing failed to mention was that over the past half-century, the apartment had become a repository for great quantities of furniture, mountains of clothes and papers and, most notably, thousands of books.

“Plus, the apartment was in shambles,” said Mr. Kobner, who represented the sellers, an elderly mother and her two grown children. “The family had lived there for decades, and the place was indescribable. When you see these homes on TV, you think they can’t be real. But they are.”

After a month on the market, the apartment sold for upward of $2.5 million, with the buyers planning to spend half a million on a gut renovation.

“But the problems were only beginning,” Mr. Kobner said. “Usually a closing takes three weeks; this one took seven. The whole transaction, which should have taken 90 days, lasted seven months. Plus, the owners couldn’t get all their stuff out. I had to help them find storage, and also a new place to live. The buyers kept wondering, will the apartment ever close?”

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MESSY or tidy — which is better?

Historically, the evidence has favored the tidy camp. Cleanliness, as the proverb says, is next to godliness. The anthropologist Mary Douglas noted almost 50 years ago a connection between clean, open spaces and moral righteousness. More recently, psychologists have shown that the scent of citrus cleaning products is enough to raise people’s ethical standards and promote trust. Conversely, in another study, people were found to associate chaotic wilderness with death.

But if messiness is so bad, why do so many people tolerate, and even embrace, it?

Not long ago, two of my colleagues and I speculated that messiness, like tidiness, might serve a purpose. Since tidiness has been associated with upholding societal standards, we predicted that just being around tidiness would elicit a desire for convention. We also predicted the opposite: that being around messiness would lead people away from convention, in favor of new directions.

We conducted some experiments to test these intuitions, and as we reported in last month’s issue of the journal Psychological Science, our hunches were borne out.

For our first study, we arranged rooms in our laboratory to look either tidy, with books and papers stacked and orderly, or messy, with papers and books strewn around haphazardly. Then we invited 188 adults to visit our laboratory individually, ostensibly for a consumer-choice study. Each subject was assigned to either a messy or a tidy room, where he or she was shown a menu from a deli that made fruit smoothies. The smoothies were said to come with a “boost” (added ingredients) from which there were three options to choose — a health, wellness or vitamin boost.

We created two versions of the menu. Half of the subjects saw a menu that had the word “classic” highlighting the health boost option, whereas the other half saw the health boost highlighted by the word “new.” Then our subjects made their choices.

As predicted, when the subjects were in the tidy room they chose the health boost more often — almost twice as often — when it had the “classic” label: that is, when it was associated with convention. Also as predicted, when the subjects were in the messy room, they chose the health boost more often — more than twice as often — when it was said to be “new”: that is, when it was associated with novelty. Thus, people greatly preferred convention in the tidy room and novelty in the messy room.

Given that divergence from the status quo is the essence of ingenuity, we conducted a second experiment to test whether messiness fostered creativity.

Forty-eight research subjects came individually to our laboratory, again assigned to messy or tidy rooms. This time, we told subjects to imagine that a Ping-Pong ball factory needed to think of new uses for Ping-Pong balls, and to write down as many ideas as they could. We had independent judges rate the subjects’ answers for degree of creativity, which can be done reliably. Answers rated low in creativity included using Ping-Pong balls for beer pong (a party game that in fact uses Ping-Pong balls, hence the low rating on innovation). Answers rated high in creativity included using Ping-Pong balls as ice cube trays, and attaching them to chair legs to protect floors.

When we analyzed the responses, we found that the subjects in both types of rooms came up with about the same number of ideas, which meant they put about the same effort into the task. Nonetheless, the messy room subjects were more creative, as we expected. Not only were their ideas 28 percent more creative on average, but when we analyzed the ideas that judges scored as “highly creative,” we found a remarkable boost from being in the messy room — these subjects came up with almost five times the number of highly creative responses as did their tidy-room counterparts.

(These results have been confirmed by independent researchers at Northwestern University, who found that subjects in a messy room drew more creative pictures and were quicker to solve a challenging brainteaser puzzle than subjects in a tidy room.)

Our findings have practical implications. There is, for instance, a minimalist design trend taking hold in contemporary office spaces: out of favor are private walled-in offices — and even private cubicles. Today’s office environments often involve desk sharing and have minimal “footprints” (smaller office space per worker), which means less room to make a mess.

At the same time, the working world is abuzz about cultivating innovation and creativity, endeavors that our findings suggest might be hampered by the minimalist movement. While cleaning up certainly has its benefits, clean spaces might be too conventional to let inspiration flow.