Most St. Louis Probate Homes Haven't Sold Yet

Bottom line: more than half of St. Louis probate homes still show the deceased's family on the title — they have not sold. Probate is full of homes that are still sitting. Pre-probate just gets you there first.

Wholesalers hear "probate" and picture a crowded list of stale leads. The data says something better. The homes are still there, and most of them have not moved.

Probate homes are still sitting

St. Louis County opens more than a hundred estate cases with a home attached every month. We matched those homes to county title records and checked who still owns them on paper.

More than half — about 55% — still carry the deceased person's family name on the title. That means the house has not sold. It is sitting, often for months, while the estate works its way through court. (A different name on title is not always a sale; it can be an heir or a trust. So the family-name homes are the clearest "still available" signal.)

This is real inventory, and the supply is steady. The hard part was never that the homes are gone. It is knowing which ones are still in play. That is the part we make easy — we flag whether the owner of record still matches the family, so you are not guessing.

The court filing is a late signal

Timing is where it gets interesting. We matched estate filings to the date of death, and the filing lands long after.

• Only 8% of estates are filed within a month of the death.
• 61% are filed more than three months later.
• The middle case takes about four months. One in eight takes more than a year.

So probate is not too late — the homes are still sitting. But the court filing is a slow clock. By the time a case is public, the death was months ago, and everyone watching CaseNet sees it on the same day.

Pre-probate is the head start

The window before the filing is the opening. A death notice — itself a public record — appears within days, months ahead of the court file. Work that window and you reach the family while the house is still quietly sitting in their name, before the CaseNet crowd shows up.

That is the leg up, and it is why we track both sides. We pick up the household from the death notice, match it to the property, check the title, and line up the contacts — so a pre-probate lead is not just early, it is ready to work. (Even the court filing is not the day someone can act — here is what CaseNet does and doesn't tell you.)

Probate is live inventory you can find today. Pre-probate is the same inventory, weeks or months earlier, already worked up. Both come from the same effort: watching the death side and the court side together.

A note on the numbers

These come from St. Louis County records over the months we have tracked. We matched homes on the death date and the owner of record, and two things are worth knowing. The death date is self-reported in the filing. And the county recorder is slow — title changes often post weeks or months after a sale actually closes, so a few homes still listed under the family name may have already sold. Treat the figures as a strong signal, not a live feed. The shape holds: the homes are still sitting, and the filing is late.