We tested six reasons a house sells. Five of them were noise.

Six signals, one survivor

A house in St. Charles County sells within six months at some rate whether or not anything happens to it. For a home picked at random, that rate is 2.6%. Almost no signal beats it.

The one that fired: a probate filing

Probate homes are cheaper and held far longer than the average home. The baseline does not adjust for either: it is every single-family home in the county that no probate case touches, with nothing matched. It counts 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 multiple could read up to about 3 percent high.

To check that it is the filing and not just a kind of house that turns over a lot, we ran the same measurement on the same homes with the clock started one, two and three years before the case was filed. They sold at 1.63%, 2.17% and 0.54%, below the 2.6% baseline every time. The jump comes on the filing date.

The five that did not

• Falling behind on property taxes. Odds ratio 1.28, range 0.68 to 2.40, on 1,400 parcels with tax status frozen before the outcome window. The effect shrinks as the delinquency deepens: 1.79 at 31 days past due, 1.28 at 60 days, 0.72 at six months. If distress drove sales, it would grow.
• What the house is worth, and how old it is. Both flat.
• Names on the title. One name 1.07×, two names 0.92×, a deed reading “et al” 1.20×. Small, and measured over only six and a half weeks, so we call them not large rather than zero.
• Both co-owners having died. It fires on 42 parcels countywide, and every parcel it reaches is already a probate parcel. It adds nothing the first signal lacks.

Even the one that works is not uniform

Across both counties, a case filed within three months of the death sold 17.7% of the time within six months. Of 105 homes filed more than two years after the death, none sold. The document filed matters too: independent administration converts at 20.2%, a refusal of letters at 4.3%.

14.1% is not the chance you get to buy it

That figure is the chance the house sells to anyone. Of the probate homes that sold, 98.4% were ordinary arm’s-length sales. Out of 100 probate leads, about 14 sell within six months and at least about 3 go to an investor entity. The other 11 sell the ordinary way, which is why reaching the family before then is the whole proposition. The 3 is a floor: our sale records can read an investor purchase that was later resold as a family purchase.

What we cannot tell you

• The 5.4× figure is one county. The six-month sale rate replicates in St. Louis County at 14.4%, against a baseline of 2.8% from a random sample of homes our sales scrapes had not yet visited, which may read slightly low. We print the two rates and no St. Louis multiple.
• How long the edge lasts is open. Earlier readings at twelve and eighteen months used a different comparison and are withdrawn; we have not re-measured them against this baseline.
• We have not measured closings. Nothing here says whether anyone bought a house. When we have that data we will publish it, including if it is unflattering.