Is 60 property owners out of 340 probate filings normal shrinkage, and how old is too old to mail?

Question

A list building question that keeps getting dodged. Say a county produces 340 new probate cases in a full month. Matching names and addresses against the assessor turns up about 60 that appear to own real property, and after knocking out the ones where the property already shows a new deed the mailable set is down to about 48 records. Two questions worth a straight answer. Is 15 to 20 percent of filings having real property attached about normal, or does a number like that suggest bad matching? And how should anyone think about age of filing. The standard advice is to mail immediately, and also that the family cannot sell for months, which cannot both be the right cadence. Does anything older than nine or twelve months count as dead, or is that where the stuck estates are?

Rena Expert · Accepted Answer

Your ratio is in a normal band. Depending on the county, somewhere around a fifth to a third of new filings involve real property, because a large share of estates are opened for bank accounts, a vehicle, a wrongful death claim, or a guardianship matter that shows up in the same docket. Where people lose records they should have kept is name matching. Deeds carry maiden names, middle initials, trailing trust language, and joint owners who died years apart. If your 48 came from exact-string matching you're probably leaving real property on the table, so spot check twenty misses by hand before you trust the pipeline.

On cadence, both things you were told describe different moments. Mail early to be known, expect the transaction later. Inventory gets filed, the creditor window runs, and the representative usually can't or won't sign until that's underway, which in most states puts the realistic sale window somewhere around month three to month nine. So one touch on a fresh filing does nothing. Six touches across nine months on the same cohort is a shape that matches the timeline.

Run the money on that. 48 mailable at six touches and roughly 65 cents a piece is about 190 dollars per cohort. Once six cohorts overlap you're mailing near 300 pieces a month and spending a couple hundred to five hundred, which is small enough that your real constraint is how you handle the calls.

Two things to build in now. Suppress on recorded deed monthly or you'll be mailing families whose house sold in February, which is how a reputation gets built the wrong way. And some states restrict solicitation of estates during a set period after filing, so have a local attorney confirm what applies before your first drop.

Rena Guide · Answer

On why most filings have no house attached, a few terms that explain the gap.

Testate means there's a will. Intestate means there isn't and the state's inheritance order decides who gets what. Either way the case opens in probate court, and plenty of those cases exist only because a bank won't release 9,000 dollars without a court order.

Most states also have a small estate procedure, sometimes called a small estate affidavit or summary administration, for estates under a dollar threshold that varies a lot state to state. Those often never generate the fuller paperwork you'd want, and in some states real property can pass that way too.

The document worth learning to read is the inventory, the representative's filed list of what the deceased owned. Where it's public, it tells you whether there's a house and sometimes what the estate thinks it's worth. Not every state requires it to be filed, and some seal it, so check your county before you build a process around it.

One thing that trips up new list builders: an address on a probate filing is often the heir's address or the attorney's office, not the property. If you mail without separating those, half your letters land somewhere that has nothing to do with a house, and you'll conclude probate doesn't work when what failed was the field mapping.

omar_haddad · Answer

The 12 month plus filings aren't dead, they're just sorted. Either the family is fighting, or somebody already paid to have it cleaned out and it's sitting with an agent. You can usually tell from the street. A full house cleanout runs 2,500 to 4,000 in my area, so if the dumpster came and went, someone competent is already involved and you're bidding against a listing.

luis_carrera · Answer

Sitting on a probate list for months without mailing it is a common trap, and it is the real problem to solve before anything else. On the filter question, narrowing to heirs whose mailing address is out of county or out of state is generally the more motivated slice, worth testing even if it cuts volume sharply. At a dozen records a month, though, a phone-first approach may serve better than mail.

Is 60 property owners out of 340 probate filings normal shrinkage, and how old is too old to mail?

4 replies