A special assessment hit her mother's condo mid-sale

The situation

'Do I have to hand over eighteen thousand dollars I don't have, just to sell my mother's condo?' That was the question Cristina asked us the week after her mother's condo corporation announced a special assessment on every unit in the building. Cristina's mother had lived in the same Thorold condo unit for close to fifteen years, and Cristina, working as a letter carrier and doing this for the first time, had been named sole executor even though the estate was to be split evenly between her and her younger sister, Analyn, a baker who ran a small shop across town and was too busy with her own business to take on the administration herself.

The estate was modest, somewhere in the $300,000 to $600,000 range once the condo unit and a small investment account were counted together, split between the two sisters. Cristina had already accepted an offer on the unit from a buyer, Manpreet, and the deal was set to close within six weeks. Then the condo corporation's board approved a special assessment to cover unexpected structural repairs to the building's parking garage, and every owner, including the estate, received a letter setting out their share of the cost.

Cristina's share came to roughly eighteen thousand dollars. Manpreet's real estate lawyer took the position that under the agreement of purchase and sale, any special assessment levied before closing was the seller's responsibility in full, and that the closing funds should be adjusted to reflect the entire amount coming off what the estate would receive. Cristina, working from a template she had found online and trying to keep the estate's legal costs down, had not looked closely at how condominium special assessments are actually meant to be shared between a seller and a buyer at closing.

She came to us with the buyer's lawyer's letter in hand, unsure whether to simply accept the deduction and move on, or whether there was something in the numbers worth questioning. Analyn, hearing the figure, was the one who first said out loud that eighteen thousand dollars seemed like a lot for a garage repair that had barely been mentioned at the one condo board meeting either of them had attended after their mother's death. That instinct turned out to matter. The condo corporation's own paperwork, once we asked for it, told a more complicated story than the assessment notice alone suggested.

What the other side was relying on

Manpreet's lawyer was relying on the letter of the assessment notice, treating the full amount as a debt that existed the moment the board approved it, with nothing to offset it. That is a reasonable starting position when all you have is the notice itself. The notice named a total assessment, divided it by unit, and gave a due date. Read on its own, it looked like the estate simply owed eighteen thousand dollars, full stop, and that the standard closing adjustments for condo status certificate fees would apply on top of that.

What the notice did not show, because it was not designed to, was where the money in the condo corporation's reserve fund fit into the picture. Condo corporations are required to maintain a reserve fund for exactly this kind of major repair, funded over years through the monthly common expense fees every owner already pays. A special assessment is usually the shortfall between what a repair costs and what the reserve fund can cover, not the full cost of the repair itself. The assessment letter Cristina received stated the total repair cost and the per-unit share of that total. It did not separately show how much of the repair the reserve fund was already funding.

Manpreet's lawyer's position assumed the entire assessed amount was a fresh, unfunded liability landing on the estate with no offset. That assumption was not unreasonable on the surface, and it is the position many sellers simply accept because chasing it down means requesting further records from the condo corporation's property manager, which takes time and a certain amount of persistence that a self-represented executor juggling a full-time job and a grieving family rarely has to spare.

It also assumed Cristina would not ask for the underlying financials, since most sellers in her position take the notice at face value and negotiate, if at all, only on timing. The other side's position was not dishonest. It was simply built on the document that was easiest to produce, rather than the fuller accounting that would show what the estate's unit was actually contributing toward versus what the reserve fund was already carrying.

What we did

1. Requested the condo corporation's full reserve fund study and the board's special assessment resolution, not just the notice Cristina had received, because the notice alone did not show how the total repair cost was being funded between the fresh assessment and the reserves the corporation had already built up over years of common expense contributions from every owner.
2. Had the property manager confirm, in writing, the reserve fund's contribution to the garage repair, which took two follow-up calls and turned out to be covering close to sixty percent of the total project cost, leaving a materially smaller shortfall to be split among owners than the headline number on the original notice had suggested.
3. Recalculated the estate's actual share from scratch once the reserve fund's contribution was confirmed, rather than accepting the property manager's verbal estimate at face value, because a per-unit figure this large deserved an independent check against the underlying numbers, not a second-hand assurance. Running the corrected repair cost through the same per-unit formula the condo corporation had used brought Cristina's exposure down from roughly eighteen thousand dollars to closer to seven thousand, a figure we could show our work on line by line if the buyer's lawyer ever asked how we got there.
4. Reviewed the agreement of purchase and sale's adjustment clause carefully, word by word, confirming that it referred to the amount actually owing at closing rather than the gross figure printed on the initial notice, which gave us a contractual basis to insist on the corrected number rather than simply arguing informally about fairness.
5. Sent Manpreet's lawyer the corrected accounting with the property manager's written confirmation attached, rather than a bare assertion that the number was wrong, so the revised figure was something their office could independently verify rather than something they had to take purely on our word.
6. Kept Analyn informed at every step, since she was an equal beneficiary even though Cristina alone held the executor's authority, sending her copies of the corrected accounting so both sisters understood exactly why the number had changed and neither was left wondering later whether the other had simply accepted the first figure offered.
7. Negotiated the timing of payment so the corrected assessment amount was deducted at closing from the estate's proceeds rather than requiring Cristina to pay it out of pocket beforehand, which kept the estate's limited cash flow intact through a sale that was already carrying enough pressure without an advance payment demand added to it.
8. Confirmed the status certificate reflected the corrected figure before closing, since a status certificate showing the wrong assessment amount can create problems for the buyer's financing as well as the seller's payout, and a mismatch discovered at this late stage tends to delay closing for everyone involved, buyer and estate alike.

The outcome

The sale closed on schedule, six weeks after the offer was accepted, with the estate paying its corrected share of roughly seven thousand dollars rather than the eighteen thousand originally demanded. The difference came directly out of proceeds that would otherwise have gone to Cristina and Analyn as beneficiaries, split evenly between them under their mother's will, so the eleven-thousand-dollar gap was real money in each of their pockets, not a technicality that only mattered on paper.

Manpreet's lawyer accepted the corrected figure once the reserve fund documentation was in hand, and there was no further dispute or delay at closing itself. The negotiation stayed businesslike throughout; this was not a case of bad faith on the other side, just a first position built on an incomplete document that a fuller accounting corrected once someone actually asked the right question of the right person.

Cristina told us afterward that she had almost just paid the original number to avoid the hassle of chasing down more paperwork while also managing her mother's funeral arrangements and her own full-time job delivering mail six days a week. Analyn's instinct that the figure seemed too high, raised in an offhand comment rather than a formal objection, was what actually prompted the closer look. The lesson both sisters took from it was less about condo law specifically and more about the value of asking one more question before accepting a number that arrives on official-looking letterhead. The assessment notice was accurate as far as it went. It simply did not go far enough on its own to tell the estate what it actually owed, and nobody at the condo corporation was under any obligation to volunteer the rest.

What you can learn from this