THE setting for the closing on an apartment in the East 50s was a lawyer’s office. Things seemed to be going well between the sellers until the wife found out the price her husband had received for the apartment. She clearly didn’t think it was enough. When he asked her to turn over her keys, she hurled them at him and hit him in the forehead, drawing blood.


This is New York City, where real estate transactions can literally take on the trappings of a blood sport. Unlike most other parts of the country, it is a place where lawyers are invariably involved in the transaction; at the very least, this increases the number of people around the table. Deals can be dauntingly complex. Even with relatively low-end properties, mind-boggling amounts of money change hands. Cultural differences, common in this multicultural city, can add kindling to a volatile situation, as can personal issues like a messy divorce.


Not to mention the fact that New York is heavy on Type A individuals. Or as Stephen Raphael, who has been practicing real estate law in New York for four decades and has seen his share of drama-packed closings, summed it up, “A lot of people in this city have gotten what they want by being emotional.”


Some of that emotion is understandable. The purchase or sale of a house or apartment is the biggest financial transaction most buyers or sellers will ever be involved in, and the closing is the moment when the promises and concessions that have been patched together to get a contract signed now have to be made final. All the parties — lawyers and brokers for both, along with the mortgage broker, appraiser and bank representatives — gather in a nondescript conference room at a bank or a law firm to seal the deal.


Dozens of documents, many in duplicate and triplicate, must be reviewed and signed. Sometimes pieces of paper seem to fly about at breakneck speed. The process can take hours. Considering that there were 37,000 residential closings in New York City last year (down from a peak of about 60,000 a few years ago), the opportunities for upset are many. And while the growth of the Internet has educated both buyers and sellers, information is often mixed with misinformation, which can be dangerous for buyer and seller alike.


Fern Hammond, the Halstead broker who witnessed the key-throwing incident, says lots of brokers have such tales, and recount them with relish. “They love to tell them at cocktail parties,” Ms. Hammond said.


Brokers are reluctant to name names — memories in real estate are long, and everyone hopes to live to fight another day — but even those who have hammered together hundreds of deals retain vivid memories of their more horrific closings.


True, the vast number of participants do what they can to keep things under control. “Please let’s keep this professional,” Juan Rodriguez, a Citi Habitats broker, pleaded by e-mail to a seller’s lawyer after a volley of acrimonious messages sent in connection with the sale of a condo in Turtle Bay. “We are in the relationship business, not the arm-twisting or pressure business.”


Yet such peacekeeping attempts don’t always succeed. And although brokers and lawyers agree that the potential for high emotion at closings fluctuates depending on the shifting real estate climate, they need little prompting to share their favorite horror stories.


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Mr. Raphael remembers, though he would probably rather forget, a particularly bitter closing last year involving the sale of a two-family brownstone in Greenwich Village carrying a price tag of more than $3 million.


“Two days earlier, the sellers had removed the washing machine from the premises,” said Mr. Raphael, who was representing them. “Frankly, you and I wouldn’t have wanted that washing machine. It was eight years old and worth maybe $100. But the buyers had already felt pressured to up their offer and to concede many things, and this was the last straw.