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The typical contested parcel at the county's tax auction sold for 32% more than it had to — in every one of six sales

Six sales, and not one where the middle winner of a contested parcel cleared the next-highest bid by less than that. Last August it was 40.3%, and not one dollar of it earns redemption interest. We reviewed 6,177 bids across 2,635 parcels — every bid placed, not only the winning ones.

Sealed bids accepted from Friday 21 August · final deadline 5pm Wednesday 26 August 2026

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Every bid at St. Louis County's delinquent-tax sale is sealed. You write one number, hand it in, and the county publishes the winner. The bid that came second is not secret — it is simply uncounted. Nobody had ever added it all up, so nobody knew what an ordinary competitor actually writes. Without that, a bid is a considered guess, and a considered guess errs high.

Across six sales, erring high has cost the winners of contested parcels $15,468,650 more than the sale required of them — the gap between what they paid and the next-highest bid, added up parcel by parcel. None of it comes back: under RSMo 140.340 redemption interest runs on the outstanding amount the sale was held to collect, and it is paid by the owner catching up — not by the county. An overbid sits above that amount, so not one dollar of it ever earns a cent.

The dollar figure moves around, because the parcels do. What holds still is the proportion. In the cheapest of the six the middle winner of a contested parcel still paid 32% more than the bid that would have won; in the dearest, 51% more. And this is not a market that punishes you by a nose. The typical losing envelope in the most recent sale sat 42.7% below the winning bid — if your number did not win, it was very likely nowhere near, and a few hundred dollars more would not have changed it.

What the typical winner of a contested parcel paid above the bid that would have won, last August

40.3%

The price of writing a number without knowing what an ordinary competitor writes. It buys nothing the sale did not already require, and none of it earns redemption interest. The lowest this figure has ever been, in six sales, is 32%.

Paid above the runner-up, six sales combined

$15,468,650

Sale years 2020–2025. Every dollar of it sits above the opening bid, so none of it earns redemption interest.

Paid over the county's asking price by bidders facing no competition at all, last August

$987,014

Parcels with a single envelope on them, where the winner paid more than the published opening bid anyway. Nobody was bidding against them.

And that is only the half of the sale that had a rival in it

Everything above counts contested parcels. Nearly half of this sale is not contested at all: 47.3% of what sold last August drew a single envelope, the highest of the six. Those parcels have no runner-up, so not one dollar of what their winners paid appears in the $15,468,650 above.

They have a different number to be measured against — the county's published opening bid, the amount the sale was held to collect. You cannot bid below it, and you are not required to bid above it. Of the 243 lone bidders last August whose parcel carried a published opening bid, 15 paid it and not a dollar more. The other 228 — 93.8% — paid the county more than it asked, with nobody bidding against them. The typical one paid 1.36 times the ask. One paid 17.8 times it.

It is not a fluke of one year. That share has been above 93% in every one of the six sales, for $3,766,084 paid over the asking price by people bidding against nobody. This is the overbid without a rival to blame it on, and it is the most avoidable money in the sale — because which parcels draw a rival is not evenly spread. It moves with value band, land use and district, and it is knowable in advance.

You are not bidding against a crowd. You are bidding against a shortlist.

84 bidders placed an envelope in the most recent sale — the fewest of the six. 54 of them won anything at all, and 30 went home with nothing, which is ordinary here: more than a third of everyone who shows up wins nothing, in every sale we hold. Three buyers took 321 of the 554 parcels sold — 57.9% of the whole sale, the highest concentration of the six.

And one of them carries most of the premium. Of every dollar ever paid above a runner-up in this record, 48.1% went to a single buyer — six sales running, under a differently-named LLC each year. They have won 475 parcels across those six sales. The overpayment is not spread evenly across a field of strangers. It has an address.

You would not find that in the county's file, and here is why. Bidders appear in the public record only as a registration number, and the county reissues the numbers. Across the six sale years in the record there are 563 distinct bidder numbers: 465 appear in exactly one year, 98 in exactly two, and not one in three or more. Read that file and every sale looks like a fresh set of strangers.

It isn't. We hold the county's own bidder-registration rosters for six consecutive sales, 2020 through 2025 — 1,416 registrations in all, released to us by the county under our own Missouri Sunshine Law request. Matching names back to numbers, one sale at a time, puts the continuity straight back. The buyer above is the case in point: those 475 parcels were won by a company Missouri registers afresh every year, under a new name and a new charter number each time. In the county's own file that is six different bidders. It is one.

We don't name the buyers here. The guide does, with each one's entry year, exit year, win rate, and margin trend.

So the premium is not set by competition against strangers. It is set against a market whose regulars we can now trace back — even though the county's own bidder numbers cannot.

One more thing about that room, and it cuts the other way. The most recent sale offered more parcels than the other five — 554 sold — to the smallest field of the six. That is 1.92 bids per parcel, the thinnest competition in six years, and it is why the winner did not have to reach as far past the field last August as the year before. We are not going to tell you it stays that way. The premium narrowed because fewer people turned up, and people can turn up again.

What's actually at stake

1You do not win, and you are not close. Across the six sales 57.3% of sold parcels drew a second bidder, and the typical losing envelope sat 42.7% below the winning bid. Losing here is not a near miss you fix by adding a few hundred dollars.
2You win, and pay more than you had to. The typical winner of a contested parcel has paid at least 32% above the next-highest bid in every sale on record, and 40.3% in the most recent one; the total comes to $15,468,650 across six. Under RSMo 140.340, none of it earns redemption interest.
3You win alone, and still pay over the ask. Nearly half of this sale draws a single bidder, and 93.8% of those winners paid more than the county's published opening bid anyway — $987,014 of it last August, with nobody else in the room.
4What happens next is not in the public record. No source we hold — ours or the county's — tracks whether a winner's parcel from the six priced sales was later redeemed. The nearest signal we have for the 2026 offering: 23 of the 3,827 parcels on the list had already cleared their balance before the sale, as of July 27, 2026. That is not a redemption rate — it is the closest thing to one anybody can currently observe.

Figure 1

What the premium added up to, year by year.

Total dollars paid above the runner-up bid, by sale year
Sale year	Contested parcels	Paid above the runner-up
2020	206	$1,257,871
2021	352	$1,872,979
2022	240	$2,309,754
2023	220	$3,285,111
2024	256	$3,604,938
2025	292	$3,137,997
All six sales	—	$15,468,650

Contested parcels are those drawing two or more bids. The right-hand column is the gap between the winning bid and the next-highest bid, summed across every contested parcel that year — money the sale did not require and that earns no redemption interest under RSMo 140.340.

Inside the Investor Strategy Guide

Two parts, one purchase — a written report (01–04) and an interactive guide to every 2026 parcel (05–07).

01What parcels like yours have actually taken — the winning bid and the bid behind it, as a share of county appraised value, broken out by value band, land use and school district. The average you have never had.
02How likely you are to face anyone at all. The share of parcels drawing a rival bid runs from roughly one in eight at the bottom of the value ladder to more than four in five at the top. Knowing which end a parcel sits on changes the number you write.
03The repeat buyers, by name. Entry year, exit year, win rate and margin trend across six sales — including the three postures the regulars bid from, and why the low bid that works at their volume wins nothing at yours.Records in hand
04What being wrong costs, and where the ceiling is. The gap between the winning bid and the next one, year by year and at the worst tenth — plus what bidding high enough to win nearly always would have cost, which is several times what the market actually left on the table.
05Every parcel in the 2026 offering, filterable by round, opening bid, land use and school district.Interactive
06A ceiling calculator. Enter your parcel, get the RSMo 140.340 math on your number, not ours.Interactive
07Where every 2026 parcel stands right now, including which ones have already cleared their balance before the sale.Interactive

$249 — the report and the interactive guide, both delivered on purchase.

Buy the Investor Strategy GuideThe Tax Sale Will Return in 2027

That $15,468,650 is not what competition cost. Nobody bid these parcels up; in a sealed sale nobody can. It is what six years of bidding without an average cost the people who won — and another $3,766,084 went to parcels where there was no competition at all. You still cannot know who writes the other envelope. You can know what parcels like yours have taken, and how often they draw anyone at all — for every parcel in the sale you are about to bid in.

Buy the Investor Strategy GuideThe Tax Sale Will Return in 2027

Methodology: compiled from St. Louis County delinquent-tax sale bid records covering every bid placed, not only winning bids — 6,177 bids across 2,635 parcels, sale years 2020–2025. Margin figures describe the gap between the winning bid and the next-highest bid on the same parcel; they describe what bidders paid relative to one another and make no claim about any parcel's value. Contested parcels are those drawing two or more bids. Figures measured against the county's published opening bid cover the 243 single-bidder parcels of the 2025 sale that carry one; thirty parcels that year appear in the county's Valid Bids release but in neither sale book, so they have no published opening bid and are excluded from those measures only. The 2026 sale is sealed-bid under the county's published instructions; that those same six sale years were also single-sealed-bid is inferred from the bid record rather than from a county statement of format — across all 6,177 bids, no bidder placed a second bid on the same parcel in the same year. Figures are reproducible from the county bid record. This document is market research. It is not legal, tax, or investment advice, it recommends no bid on any parcel, and it forecasts no future sale. We strive to exceed your expectations with honesty and transparency.