Kentucky

In eastern Kentucky the surface and the minerals beneath it are often owned by different people, and have been since the coal and timber agents came through in the early 1900s buying mineral estates under “broad form” deeds.

For most of the twentieth century the courts read those deeds as giving the mineral owner the dominant estate and the right to reach the coal by any means, including stripping the surface off a farm whose owner had no remedy.

Kentucky voters ended that in November 1988 with a constitutional amendment, now Section 19(2), which presumes that a deed silent on method permits only the extraction methods in common use in that part of the state when it was signed, so for deeds written before mechanised stripping existed the surface owner’s consent is needed now.

The severance itself did not go away, so a title search on an eastern Kentucky parcel routinely turns up a mineral estate in a name nobody in the family recognises, and that is a question to answer before a sale rather than during one.

Foreclosure is judicial and ends at a master commissioner’s sale, advertised for three consecutive weeks, with the property appraised by two appraisers beforehand.

Under KRS 426.530, if the winning bid comes in below two thirds of the appraised value, the former owner has six months to redeem by paying the bid plus ten per cent interest, and the purchaser takes a deed carrying a lien that reflects that right.

Above two thirds there is no redemption at all, so bidding tends to cluster just above that line, and what a Kentucky property is appraised at matters as much as what it sells for.