Hoarding — the act of collecting stuff and rarely getting rid of it — poses a special challenge to agents brought in to sell a home with an owner suffering from the now-official mental disorder. Visuals are limited to floor plans, shots of a building’s exterior or another unit in the building if it’s a co-op, and open houses, if possible, pose a health hazard to children.
“When I arrived for our first meeting, I got the shock of my life,” a broker with Halstead Property told the New York Times about a packed Park Avenue one-bedroom apartment in New York City that he was brought in to help sell. “But the light, the views and the location were incredible.”
He ended up helping the owner find storage for her things and hired his own housecleaner to spruce up the place, but the listing danced around the home’s garish truth: The images were of floor plans and the terrace, and the description used “careful language to mention that the apartment had great bones.”
His experience is not unique. “Some of the best addresses in New York City have hoarders in them,” an agent who sold a hoarder-owned place on the Upper West Side last year told the Times.
Source: New York Times
