When I was on the buying side, the letter always said ten days.
That was not a schedule. That was the product. I want to be really clear about this, because I think people assume the urgency in those letters is about logistics, about a contractor's calendar or an investor's 1031 timeline. It is not. Every single day a homeowner has to think is a day the price goes up and my spread goes down. A woman with a weekend signs. A woman with two weeks calls her daughter, and her daughter calls a realtor, and now there are three offers on the table and I am out.
Time was the only thing that ever beat me. Not regulation, not disclosure forms, not some consumer protection pamphlet. Just time.
So when I read that Missouri had signed a bill that does nothing except force people to slow down, I sat up. Because whoever wrote it understands the business better than most of the people writing about it.
What Missouri actually did
Governor Mike Kehoe signed Senate Bill 973 into law on July 13, 2026, as part of a batch of remaining legislation from the Second Regular Session of the 103rd General Assembly. The bill was sponsored by Senator Curtis Trent with Representative Chris Brown handling it in the House. It takes effect August 28, 2026.
Two pieces of it matter to families, and the one getting less attention is the one that scares me more.
Piece one: the wholesaler disclosure
Under a new Section 407.3600, a wholesaler dealing in residential real property has to hand the property owner a written disclosure at least fourteen calendar days before entering into a contract that transfers an interest in the property. Both the wholesaler and the owner have to sign and date it before any contract happens.
The disclosure has to say the quiet parts out loud. That the buyer is acting as a wholesaler. That the contract may be assigned to somebody else for a profit. That the wholesaler may never actually take title to the property at all. And that the agreed price may be below market value.
If the wholesaler skips it, the owner can cancel the contract any time before the close of escrow, without penalty, and the escrow agent has to disburse any earnest money back to the owner within thirty days of the cancellation. The protections cannot be waived or modified by agreement. Any part of an agreement that tries to waive them, signed or modified after the effective date, is null and void.
Violating it is an unlawful practice under the Missouri Merchandising Practices Act. A homeowner who signed without getting the disclosure can bring a private action. The Attorney General can bring a civil action.
Piece two: the sale leaseback, which nobody is talking about
The same bill creates the Missouri Residential Sale Leaseback Protection Act at Section 442.920. This is the part I would circle in red if I were showing this to a family.
A sale leaseback, as the act defines it, is a transaction where a seller sells the home they live in and, as a condition of that sale or as part of a related transaction, enters into a lease to stay in the property or move back into it.
Read that again in the voice of somebody sitting at your mother's kitchen table. You do not have to move. Just sell us the house and rent it back. You will never have to leave.
That is the pitch. And it is aimed with real precision at exactly one kind of person: somebody sitting on a paid-off house who is terrified of leaving it. The fear of the move is the lever. The equity is the prize.
Under the new act, a buyer has to give the seller a detailed disclosure at least fourteen calendar days before the sale leaseback agreement is executed. The disclosure gets signed by both parties at execution, and a copy goes to the seller within five days. And here is the real teeth: there can be no delivery, recording, or other transfer of title from seller to buyer until thirty days after the agreement is executed.
Violations carry a civil penalty of up to $10,000 each. The Attorney General can enforce it. A harmed seller can sue. Like the wholesaler section, none of it can be waived by agreement.
Fourteen days before, thirty days after. Forty-four days from first pitch to a deed that moves.
Why the calendar is the whole point
Notice what Missouri did not do.
They did not cap the price. A wholesaler in Missouri can still offer your mother sixty cents on the dollar, and that is still legal. They did not ban wholesaling, and honestly they should not have. They did not ban sale leasebacks either. Some sale leasebacks are legitimate transactions between sophisticated parties.
They did not outlaw the deal. They outlawed the speed.
That is a much smarter piece of legislation than a price cap would have been, and here is why. A price cap invites lawyers to argue about market value. A disclosure requirement without a waiting period gets papered over, because a person who is scared and rushed will sign a disclosure and a contract in the same sitting and could not tell you afterward what either one said. I watched people do it. They were not stupid. They were overwhelmed, and I was counting on it.
But a mandatory fourteen-day gap between the disclosure and the contract is not something you can paper over. It is a hole in the middle of the deal where a phone call happens.
And the phone call is what kills it. Not the disclosure. The daughter in Charlotte who says wait, what, let me look this up. The neighbor who says my cousin got one of those. The realtor who runs comps and says you are being offered a hundred and forty grand under. None of those people can save your family in a weekend. All of them can save your family in two weeks.
What this means for families
Here is the hard part, and I am not going to dress it up.
Unless you are in Missouri, this law does nothing for you.
A handful of states have moved on wholesaler transparency in the last couple of years, and the pattern is roughly the same each time: disclose that you are a wholesaler, disclose that the contract can be assigned, give the seller some window to get out. But most of the country has nothing. North Carolina, where I live and hold a license, has no wholesaler disclosure statute and no sale leaseback waiting period.
So the forty-four days is on you. Nobody is going to legislate it into your family's kitchen. You just have to take it.
The good news is nobody can stop you from taking it
This is what I want families to actually walk away with. You do not need a law to give you the fourteen days. You need to understand that the person across the table needs you not to take them, and then take them anyway.
If somebody needs your signature this week, that is your answer. That is the entire test. A buyer who is still there in two weeks was a real buyer. A buyer who evaporates when you say "I want my daughter to look at this first" was never offering you a deal. He was offering you a countdown.
The sale leaseback deserves its own warning
I want to isolate this one because it wears a kinder mask than the rest.
Everything else in the predatory playbook feels like a transaction. The sale leaseback feels like a favor. It shows up dressed as the solution to the exact thing your parents are most afraid of, which is being made to leave the house they raised you in. That is why it works and that is why Missouri singled it out.
Run the math out loud, because the pitch never does. Your parents no longer own the house. They own a lease. Leases end. Rent goes up. The new owner can sell the building to somebody else, and that somebody else has no relationship with your mother and no sentimental interest in the arrangement. The equity that took forty years to build is gone in one signature, converted into a monthly bill on a house they used to own free and clear.
There are situations where a sale leaseback is the right call. They are rare, and they involve a lawyer, and they never start with an unsolicited knock at the door.
Step-by-step, what to do if a letter shows up
Step 1: Do not respond on their timeline
The first move is always to take the clock away from them, because the clock is the whole trick. You do not have to be rude. "I am interested, but nothing gets signed for two weeks in this family." That single sentence sorts real buyers from the rest, for free, in about nine seconds.
Step 2: Find out what the house is actually worth
Not the tax assessment, which is usually wrong in both directions. An actual comparative market analysis from somebody with no stake in the outcome. You need a real number before you can evaluate any offer, because "is $210,000 a good offer?" is an unanswerable question until you know the house is worth $310,000.
Step 3: Ask who is actually buying
Ask it plainly. Are you the buyer, or are you assigning this contract to somebody else? Will your name be on the deed at closing? A wholesaler in Missouri now has to answer that in writing fourteen days early. Everywhere else, you have to ask. The answer, and the way they react to being asked, tells you almost everything.
Step 4: Price the repairs before you accept the discount
This is where my construction years actually earn their keep. The whole as-is pitch depends on you believing the repairs are catastrophic and unknowable. Usually they are neither. Get a real number on what the house needs, and then look at the offer again. A $40,000 discount for $9,000 of work is not a convenience. It is a $31,000 decision you made in the dark.
And know which repairs even matter. In my flipping years, the deals that hurt were never the ones with a bad roof. They were the ones where I assumed a number instead of writing it down. Same lesson applies from your side of the table.
Step 5: Look at all the ways to sell, not the one you were shown
Most families get shown exactly one path, and it is always the path the person showing it gets paid on. List with an agent. Sell as-is for cash. Owner financing. Lease option. Subject-to. Auction. Or do nothing yet, which is a legitimate strategy that almost nobody presents because nobody makes money on it.
Which one is right depends on whether your family needs money fast, money maximized, or just to stop bleeding on carrying costs while the house sits empty. Those are three different problems with three different answers.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a sale leaseback and why is it risky for seniors?
A sale leaseback is when a homeowner sells their house and immediately signs a lease to keep living in it. It gets pitched to older homeowners as a way to access equity without moving. The risk is that your parents trade ownership for tenancy: the equity is gone, the lease can end, the rent can rise, and the new owner can sell the property to somebody with no relationship to your family.
When does Missouri SB 973 take effect?
August 28, 2026. Governor Mike Kehoe signed it on July 13, 2026. The wholesaler disclosure requirement and the Missouri Residential Sale Leaseback Protection Act both start on that date.
Does the wholesaler disclosure law apply in my state?
Only if you are in Missouri. Several states have passed their own wholesaler transparency rules over the last two years, and the details differ in every one. Most states, including North Carolina, still have no such requirement. Check your own state, and assume you have no protection until you confirm otherwise.
What happens if a Missouri wholesaler skips the disclosure?
The homeowner can cancel the contract at any time before the close of escrow with no penalty, and the escrow agent must return any earnest money to the owner within thirty days of cancellation. The violation is also an unlawful practice under the Missouri Merchandising Practices Act, which opens the door to a private lawsuit and to enforcement by the Attorney General.
Is a cash offer on my parents' house always a scam?
No, and framing it that way gets families hurt in a different direction. Cash buyers are legal and sometimes they are genuinely the right answer, especially when speed matters more than price. The problem is not that they are criminals. The problem is that they are not built to get your family the most, and they are counting on you not finding that out until after closing.
How long should we take before signing anything?
Two weeks is a reasonable floor, and Missouri just made that number official for one category of deal. If a buyer will not still be there in fourteen days, you learned something valuable for free.
Not sure what you would actually walk away with? Run the Net Proceeds Calculator before you evaluate any offer: rigginsstrategicsolutions.com/tools/net-proceeds-calculator
Want a step-by-step guide? The free Simple Blueprint walks through every stage of a senior transition: rigginsstrategicsolutions.com/freeguide
Ready for the full system? Senior Transition Blueprint Core, 20 modules and 69 tools: rigginsstrategicsolutions.com/the-blueprint
Need a personalized plan? The Senior Transition Roadmap ($297) adds a 60-min call and 90 days of email support: rigginsstrategicsolutions.com/blueprint-premium
Coordinate your family in one place. SeniorSafe app (web, iPhone, Android): app.seniorsafeapp.com
Talk it through. Book a free 20-min call with Ryan: rigginsstrategicsolutions.com/work-with-ryan
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About Ryan Riggins
Ryan Riggins is a senior transition advisor and former house flipper. After 8+ years buying homes from families in transition, he walked away from the cash-buyer side to help families avoid the $50K mistakes he used to profit from. Based in Greensboro, NC. NC Real Estate License #361546, eXp Realty. Founder of Riggins Strategic Solutions and the SeniorSafe app.
Ryan Riggins is the founder of Riggins Strategic Solutions, a consumer protection company for families navigating senior transitions. He spent 8 years in construction project management and house flipping before switching sides. Two books on Amazon. Free resources at rigginsstrategicsolutions.com.
