Kansas

Kansas gives a foreclosed owner more time after the sale than almost any state in the country, and it cannot be bargained away.

Foreclosure is judicial only, since Kansas uses mortgages rather than deeds of trust and there is no power of sale, so a lender has to sue, take judgment and have the sheriff advertise and sell.

Under K.S.A. 60-2414 the owner then has twelve months from the sheriff’s sale to redeem, and for the first three of those months the right is exclusively theirs, with no junior creditor able to step in ahead.

The period drops to three months if less than a third of the original debt had been paid when the default occurred, and a court may extend that by another three if the owner involuntarily loses their income during it.

For an owner-occupied one- or two-family home the redemption right cannot be waived or shortened in the mortgage itself, which is the opposite of how several other states handle it.

So a Kansas sheriff’s sale does not settle anything for months.

Title does not become clean until the redemption period has run, so a house that looks gone at a sheriff’s sale may not be.

The homestead protection in the Kansas Constitution shelters 160 acres of farming land, or one acre inside a town or city, occupied as a family residence.