Missouri

Few states give a seller in trouble less warning than Missouri, where foreclosure runs through a deed of trust and a successor trustee, the notice of sale is mailed at least twenty days before the auction and published for the twenty days before it, and the sale happens at the courthouse without a judge seeing the file.

Redemption exists here, but it is conditional and easy to lose by accident.

There is a one-year right to buy the property back only if the foreclosing lender itself is the buyer at the sale, only if the owner gave written notice of intent to redeem at the sale or in the ten days before it, and only if a bond was posted within twenty days after.

No will is admitted and no administration granted more than one year after the death, and every claim against the estate is barred at that same mark, a deadline far shorter than most states allow.

The small-estate affidavit is capped at $40,000 for the entire estate net of debts and counts real property toward that ceiling, so a house almost always pushes an estate past it and into full administration.

Assessment is by class rather than by value — nineteen per cent for residential, twelve for agricultural, thirty-two for commercial — so the same ground is taxed very differently depending on how it is classified, and a change of use changes the bill.

St. Louis holds the oldest land bank in the United States: the Land Reutilization Authority, created in 1971, takes title to every tax-delinquent property that goes unsold at the sheriff’s sale and now holds close to ten thousand parcels, most of them single-family houses on the city’s north side in every condition from sound to partially demolished.

Outside the metros the state is farm ground and Ozark timber, much of it held in family names for generations.