Kara Meiler Stately Ashton completed the purchase of a Lewis and Clark County property on August 19, recording a deed, a new mortgage, and a declaration of homestead all on the same day — a same-session filing pattern that signals a primary residence purchase rather than an investment acquisition.
The property is located in the G and B Tracts Subdivision, identified as Lot 11-2, recorded in Book M65 at Page 7152. The sellers were Michael D. Peery and Michael Perry. County records flag the buyer as potentially based outside Montana, which would make this a relocation purchase — someone planting roots in Lewis and Clark County rather than an existing resident moving within it.
The mortgage was originated through New American Funding LLC, with Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems Inc. also listed as a party to the lending instrument, recorded at Book M65, Page 7153. The back-to-back page numbers confirm the deed and mortgage were processed together at the recorder's office. The homestead declaration, filed the same morning, gives Stately Ashton the state's legal protections on the property as a primary residence — a step that doesn't happen with rental or investment property.
The cluster of four filings tied to three distinct property records in a single day is consistent with a closing that had been in the works for weeks and landed on the recorder's desk all at once. For Helena's housing market, which has seen sustained pressure from out-of-state buyers since the pandemic reshuffled remote-work geography, the filing is one more data point in a pattern county officials and local real estate watchers have noted repeatedly over the past several years.