Where St. Louis Estate Filings Cluster

Bottom line: estate cases in St. Louis County are not spread evenly. They cluster in a few school districts — and Parkway leads by a wide margin.

Some parts of the county see far more estate cases than others. To make that pattern easy to read, we sorted every case by school district — the kind of area most people already know by name.

Which districts have the most?

The chart ranks school districts by estate filings over the last 12 months, among the cases we matched to a real property — currently about half of all filings, not two out of three. A property match is not the same as the estate owning it: checked against county ownership records, roughly three in ten of those matches still carry the family's name (the rest are mostly former rentals the decedent never owned, or not yet checked). The district ranking itself does not depend on that distinction — it counts every property match, the same way before and after this correction. Parkway comes first, followed by Rockwood and Mehlville.

A handful of districts hold most of the activity, while many have so few cases that we leave them off the chart entirely. We hide any district with fewer than five filings so that no single family can be identified.

Why does this matter?

If you work in estate real estate, where you look is half the job. A short list of districts holds most of the deals and the rest stay quiet, so knowing which is which saves you real time. The countywide totals behind this map live in the Monthly Market Pulse.

What we haven't done yet

We have not adjusted for how many homes sit in each district, so a larger district can look busy simply because it is large. Correcting for that would need census data we have not added, and for now a clear count we trust beats a polished rate we cannot.

This page updates as the data grows.