Two Trustees Could Not Agree on a Price in Ottawa

The situation

What Ha-eun was actually afraid of was not losing a house. It was losing the specific arrangement that had made the move to Ottawa work at all: a school she and Dong-hyun had already secured a spot at for their older child, a closing date lined up with the end of their temporary lease, and a mortgage pre-approval that assumed a purchase within a narrow window. Any one of those pieces slipping meant the whole sequence they had spent months assembling from another country would need to be rebuilt, and rebuilding it was not simply inconvenient. It risked the family's housing arrangement unravelling entirely at a moment when they had few backup options in a city they had lived in for less than a year.

Ha-eun, a specialist physician, and Dong-hyun, a surgeon, had relocated to Ottawa for work roughly nine months earlier. Both had demanding, inflexible schedules that left little room to manage a complicated real estate transaction personally, and both had assumed, reasonably, that a purchase in the one-and-a-half to two-million-dollar range would move at the pace a transaction of that size usually does: professionally, on schedule, without drama. The property they had settled on was being sold by an estate, through two co-trustees named in the will, a common enough arrangement when a homeowner leaves the property to be sold and the proceeds divided.

The trustees, it turned out, did not agree with each other about very much. One favoured accepting the family's offer promptly to avoid the costs and uncertainty of carrying the property longer. The other, Lorna, believed the market supported a higher price and wanted to push back, list further, or hold out for a better number. Their disagreement had been simmering for weeks before Ha-eun and Dong-hyun's offer arrived, and the offer did not resolve it; it just gave the trustees something new to disagree about.

By the time the family retained us, the file was already showing signs of strain that neither of them fully understood yet. Their previous lawyer, working under significant time pressure and without much cooperation from the estate's side, had let a contractual deadline pass without either extending it or flagging clearly to the family what that meant. Ha-eun's question when she called was not about the trustees at all. It was simply: are we going to lose this house.

What made this urgent

The missed deadline was what made the file urgent rather than merely difficult. The agreement of purchase and sale had included a condition requiring the estate to provide certain confirmations of its authority to sell, standard in any transaction where a trustee rather than an individual owner is the seller, within a set number of days. That date had passed roughly a week before Ha-eun and Dong-hyun came to us, with no formal extension signed and no clear record of why it had slipped.

Most conditions in a standard residential agreement of purchase and sale are written so that if the required notice is not delivered by the deadline, the agreement automatically comes to an end and the deposit is returned. Whether that was what had already happened here turned on the exact wording of this particular clause and on whether the parties, by continuing to act as though the deal were still alive, had revived it. If the trustees' internal disagreement escalated into one of them arguing the deal had already lapsed on its own terms, the family could be left with no agreement, no house, and a mortgage pre-approval quietly expiring while they searched for something else in an unfamiliar market.

Estate trustees selling property are not free agents the way an individual seller is. They act under duties owed to the estate's beneficiaries, and when two trustees are named jointly, most estates require them to act together rather than allowing one to bind the estate alone. That structure, sound as a safeguard against a single trustee acting badly, becomes a liability when the two trustees simply cannot agree. Neither trustee had done anything wrong in the legal sense; they disagreed about strategy, which is common, but their inability to resolve that disagreement quickly was what had let the deadline slip in the first place, since neither wanted to be the one who signed off on an extension the other might later criticize.

Time worked against the family in a second way as well. Their mortgage pre-approval had a fixed expiry, and every week spent waiting on the trustees to sort out their disagreement brought that expiry closer. If the pre-approval lapsed before a firm deal was in place, the family would need to requalify under whatever rates and terms applied at that later date, an outcome that could change the numbers on the entire purchase.

There was also a quieter pressure specific to the family's situation. Having arrived in Canada less than a year earlier, Ha-eun and Dong-hyun did not yet have the kind of established local credit and banking history that often smooths a second attempt at qualifying for a mortgage if a first attempt lapses. Their approval had been built carefully around their new employment contracts and a Canadian bank account still less than a year old. Losing that approval was not simply an inconvenience to be repeated; it risked a genuinely more difficult and slower process the second time around, at a moment when the family had little appetite left for more uncertainty.

What we did

1. Reviewed exactly what the missed deadline meant under the agreement. We read the condition clause closely to determine whether the passed date had automatically terminated the agreement, left it voidable at either party's election, or simply left an unresolved formality that both sides could still fix by agreement. The wording pointed toward the third option, which gave us room to work with rather than a dead file.
2. Contacted both trustees' lawyer to confirm the estate still intended to sell. Spending weeks negotiating extension terms and price with an estate that had already quietly decided to walk away would have wasted the family's remaining timeline on a deal that was never coming back. Before investing further effort, we needed to know whether the estate's side viewed the agreement as alive at all, since the trustees' internal disagreement created real doubt about whether either of them would confirm anything without the other's sign-off first.
3. Requested the specific authority confirmations the condition had called for. Trying to leverage the missed date into fresh concessions would have invited a fight over the deal's validity that neither side needed. Rather than treating the lapse as an opening to reopen the whole deal, we simply asked for what the clause had always required: written confirmation that both trustees had the authority to complete the sale and were acting jointly, which the estate's lawyer was able to produce once pressed.
4. Proposed a short, formal extension to replace the lapsed date. Leaving the original deadline informally understood as passed, rather than formally replaced, would have left the deal one disagreement away from either trustee arguing later that it had simply died on the original date. With the confirmations in hand, we drafted a mutual extension agreement that reset the timeline cleanly, removing that ambiguity around whether the original agreement still bound either side and giving both trustees a fixed point to work toward together going forward.
5. Pressed for a decision on price once the paperwork was current. With the authority question resolved, the trustees' disagreement over price became the last open issue, and letting it sit unresolved indefinitely served neither side while the family's financing clock kept running. We made clear to the estate's lawyer that further delay was not free: the buyers' pre-approval was time-limited, and continued uncertainty risked losing the sale for the estate entirely rather than simply producing a better number for Lorna eventually.
6. Helped structure a modest price adjustment both trustees could accept. A number pitched only to what the family wanted to pay would have kept Lorna dug in indefinitely. Lorna was not going to simply concede, and the family, eager to preserve the deal, agreed to a small increase over the original offer, less than they would have liked to pay but enough to give Lorna grounds to sign off without feeling she had capitulated.
7. Coordinated a revised closing date against the mortgage pre-approval's expiry. Setting a closing date around the estate's convenience alone, without checking it against the family's financing, could have produced a technically resolved sale that still collapsed weeks later on a lapsed rate hold. We worked backward from the date the family's approval would expire to set a closing timeline with enough buffer to absorb any further estate-side delay without forcing the family to requalify under whatever terms applied by then.
8. Kept the family informed in plain terms at every stage. A family working demanding clinical schedules could not absorb long legal updates between shifts. Ha-eun and Dong-hyun had limited time to spare, so we gave them short, direct updates focused on what each development meant for their timeline and budget rather than a full account of the trustees' internal dynamics, which let them make quick, confident decisions whenever we needed one from them.

The outcome

The sale closed roughly five weeks after Ha-eun and Dong-hyun retained us, at a price modestly above their original offer but comfortably within the range they had budgeted for. The family kept the school placement, the closing date lined up closely enough with the end of their lease that they avoided a costly bridge period, and the mortgage pre-approval held for the revised timeline with only a small margin to spare.

The compromise was real, not cosmetic. The family paid more than they had originally offered, and the added cost, while modest in the context of a purchase in that price range, was money they would rather have kept. They also gave up the chance to hold firm and see whether the trustees' disagreement might have eventually resolved in a way more favourable to them, a real possibility they chose not to test once the risk to their timeline became clear.

For the trustees, the resolution let both walk away from the file having gotten something: the one who wanted speed got a completed sale within weeks rather than a relisting and a longer wait, and Lorna got a number closer to what she had been holding out for. Neither trustee got everything, which is generally the sign of a workable compromise rather than a clean win for either side. Ha-eun said afterward that what mattered most to her was not the extra amount they paid but simply knowing, finally, that the deal was going to close, after a period of not knowing that had cost her more sleep than the money ever would.

The family moved in on the revised closing date, roughly a week later than their original target but well within the window their school placement and lease allowed. Their mortgage funded under the original pre-approval terms, with a few weeks to spare before it would have expired. Looking back, Dong-hyun said the missed deadline they inherited had been the part that frightened him most, not because it was necessarily fatal but because nobody had explained clearly what it actually meant until we did, and the uncertainty in between had felt far larger than the eventual, containable problem turned out to be.

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