Probate & Pre-Probate
What a Probate Filing Actually Predicts
Bottom line: a St. Charles County home with a probate filing sold within six months 5.4 times as often as a home picked at random. Out of 100 probate leads, about 14 sell within six months. About 3 of those go to an investor. The other 11 sell the ordinary way, to a family, through an agent.
Most lists you can buy tell you that something happened. Almost none of them tell you what usually happens next. We measured it.
What did we measure?
We took the St. Charles County probate cases we could tie to a specific home, and kept the ones filed early enough to have a full six months of sales history behind them. That is 184 homes. Our matching starts in early 2025 and the cutoff falls at the start of 2026, so the filings run across roughly a year.
Then we counted how many of those homes recorded a real, priced sale in the six months after the case was opened.
26 of 184 sold. That is 14.1%.
By itself that number means nothing. You need to know what a normal house does over the same six months. So we measured that too.
What is the baseline sale rate?
It is how often a home picked at random sells in the same six months. In St. Charles County that is every single-family home in the county, 118,395 homes, less the homes a probate case touches. We matched nothing to the probate group on price, years owned, age or area, because each of those is a choice we would then have to defend.
Those homes sold at 2.6% over six months. The probate homes sold at 14.1%. That is 5.4 times as often.
Probate homes are not like other homes. Ours are cheaper: the median home in our group last sold for $171,000, against $205,000 for the county. And they are held far longer, a median of 18.4 years against 9.5 years county-wide. The baseline does not adjust for either difference, so the next test matters.
How do we know it is the filing and not the house?
This is the part that matters, and it is the part almost nobody does.
We ran the same test on the same 184 homes, with the same baseline — but we started the clock one year, two years, and three years before the probate was actually filed.
If these were simply houses that turn over a lot, they would look elevated then too, so we read each earlier figure against the same 2.6% baseline sale rate.
| Clock started | They sold at |
|---|---|
| 3 years before the filing | 0.54% |
| 2 years before the filing | 2.17% |
| 1 year before the filing | 1.63% |
| After the filing | 14.1% |
All three of the earlier readings sit below the 2.6% baseline sale rate. These homes never sold faster than a home picked at random. They ran below the baseline at each of the three earlier starting points. Then the case was filed, and the rate jumped.
That is not a type of house. That is an event, on a date.
When do the sales happen?
Of the 26 sales inside six months, only 2 happened in the first 30 days. The rest spread out evenly from day 31 onward. The sales are not deals that were already closing when the case was filed. There is a real working window, and it opens about a month after the filing hits the public record.
What the number does not mean
This is where most lead pitches stop, so we will keep going.
14.1% is the chance the house sells to anyone. It is not the chance you get to buy it.
Of the probate homes that did sell, 98.4% were ordinary arm's-length sales — slightly more arm's-length than the county's 95.5%. In plain terms, the family lists the house with an agent and sells it at retail. It is not a quiet, distressed, off-market deal.
Narrow it to homes where the new owner of record is a company rather than a person, which is the closest thing we have to "an investor bought it," and the rate is 3.3% over six months. The absolute number is small.
So the honest version is the one at the top. About 14 in 100 sell. About 3 go to an investor. The other 11 are real opportunities that went to retail — and reaching the family before that happens is the entire point.
One more caution on that 3.3%: it is a floor. Our sales records stamp the parcel's current owner onto older sale rows, so a home an investor bought and later sold to a family reads as a family purchase. The true rate is higher. We cannot say how much higher, so we report the floor.
What we still cannot tell you
- This is one county and about one year of filings. 184 homes in St. Charles County, filed between early 2025 and the start of 2026. It is not seasonally adjusted, and it is not yet shown for St. Louis County.
- Most probate cases never become a lead at all. Only about a third of the St. Charles decedent-estate cases in this window could be tied to a specific parcel. Some of those were never leads to lose — a small-estate filing often holds no real estate. The rest are homes we simply have not matched yet. That costs us inventory. It does not make a delivered lead any less accurate.
- A full year is not measurable yet. Our matching only starts in early 2025, so too few homes have twelve months behind them to say anything useful about the twelve-month mark. We are not going to quote a number we cannot stand behind.
- Nothing here measures whether a buyer closed a deal. That takes outcome data we do not have yet.
What this means
A probate filing is not a guess. It is a measured change in the odds, on a known date, with a known working window, and it survives the one test that separates a real signal from a coincidence.
It is also not a promise that a distressed house is waiting for you. Most of these homes sell the ordinary way. The value is in getting there first, and in knowing which filings are worth your time before you spend it.
That is the difference between a list and a signal. A list tells you something happened. A signal tells you what usually happens next, and how sure anyone should be.
Measured against St. Charles County records: probate cases matched to a parcel by the decedent's own address, filed on or before January 1, 2026 so that each has a full 180 days behind it, with sales observed through June 30, 2026. Rates use Wilson score intervals; the baseline sale rate is every single-family home in the county less probate parcels, measured the same way over monthly start dates from April 2021 to December 2025. The baseline counts recorded sales of $10,000 or more and the probate figure counts any recorded sale above zero; sales under $10,000 are about 3 percent of probate sales, so the ratio could read up to about 3 percent high.