Executor Duties When an Estate Owns Property Overseas

The situation

Fiona died in the spring, leaving a will that named her older daughter, Jasleen, as executor. Jasleen worked retail and had never handled anything more complicated than her own taxes. Her younger sister Angela, a transit operator, was the only other beneficiary. The will was simple on its face: everything split equally between the two of them.

The estate looked straightforward at first. Fiona owned her home in Sault Ste. Marie outright, worth roughly $185,000, along with a chequing account and a small investment account totalling about $45,000. After funeral costs, unpaid utility bills and other debts of roughly $10,000, the Canadian portion of the estate came to a net value of about $210,000. Jasleen assumed her job was to sell the house, close the accounts, and cut her sister a cheque for half.

What she did not expect was a folder in her mother's filing cabinet holding decades-old paperwork for a small residential property in the country where Fiona had grown up before immigrating to Canada in her twenties. Fiona had never sold it, never mentioned it in recent years, and never updated her will to say anything specific about it. It simply existed, untouched, on the other side of the world.

What the estate review found

Jasleen came to Treadstone Law once she realized the foreign property meant her mother's estate wasn't a two-week job. The first thing our team explained is something many first-time executors don't know going in: a will can dispose of worldwide assets in principle, but the legal process to actually transfer each asset follows the law of the country where that asset sits. In Ontario, an executor applies to the Superior Court for a certificate of appointment of estate trustee, sometimes still called probate, under the Estates Act. That certificate is what lets an executor deal with Canadian banks, the land registry, and other institutions here. It carries no authority overseas.

For the property abroad, Fiona's estate would need to go through that country's own succession process, using local counsel, local documentation standards, and a valuation done under local rules. Jasleen had no relationships there, no fluency in the local property market, and no realistic way to estimate what the property was worth without professional help on the ground. An early, rough estimate — based on comparable local sales relayed by a distant relative — put its value somewhere between $70,000 and $90,000 in Canadian dollars, but that figure carried real uncertainty until a formal local valuation and title search were done.

The second problem was time. Foreign successions routinely take considerably longer than an Ontario estate, especially when the deceased has been absent from the local system for years and heirs abroad need to be notified or confirmed. Jasleen was looking at a process that could easily run past a year, layered with legal fees payable in a foreign currency, on top of the work she still had to do at home.

Angela did not take the news well. She had been counting on her half of the estate to cover a period of reduced income, and the idea of waiting a year or more for an uncertain asset on the other side of the world, while her sister acted as the sole point of contact for it, felt to her like Jasleen would end up with more control and more information than she had. That tension, more than the property itself, was the problem our team was actually hired to solve.

What we did

1. Separated the Canadian estate from the foreign asset procedurally. Nothing about the overseas property prevented Jasleen from applying for her certificate of appointment and administering the house, the bank accounts, and the debts here in Ontario. We moved that application forward immediately rather than letting the foreign complication stall work that didn't depend on it.
2. Explained an executor's actual duties, in plain terms, to both sisters. An executor owes duties to all beneficiaries equally — to act honestly, keep proper records, and avoid favouring their own interests over anyone else's. We put that in writing for Angela directly, because a lot of the friction was coming from an unspoken worry that Jasleen might quietly keep more than her share once she was the only one dealing with the foreign side.
3. Arranged a referral to local counsel for the overseas property. We are not licensed to practise law outside Canada, so we helped Jasleen find and instruct a lawyer in the relevant jurisdiction to obtain a proper local valuation, confirm clear title, and begin the succession process there under that country's rules.
4. Held back a contingency reserve before any distribution. Ontario executors are expected to account for known debts, taxes and administration costs before distributing an estate. We calculated a holdback from the Canadian assets to cover final income tax filings and closing costs, so neither sister received money that later had to be clawed back.
5. Negotiated a distribution agreement that reflected the delay, not just the asset value. Rather than making Angela wait a year or more for her full share, we drafted an agreement where she received a larger portion of the Canadian estate immediately, with Jasleen retaining responsibility for the foreign property and both sisters keeping an equal interest in whatever it eventually produced, net of foreign legal costs.
6. Documented the compromise formally, with releases. Both sisters signed a written agreement setting out the interim split, Jasleen's ongoing authority to instruct foreign counsel on Angela's behalf, and a mutual release protecting Jasleen from a later claim that the interim distribution was unfair, provided she accounted honestly for the eventual proceeds.

The outcome

The Canadian estate closed within several months of the application being filed. Of the roughly $210,000 net Canadian estate, Angela received about $130,000 up front rather than the $105,000 an even split would have produced, in exchange for accepting the wait and the uncertainty on the foreign side. Jasleen received the remaining $80,000 immediately and retained sole carriage of the overseas property, with a signed commitment to split whatever it eventually nets — after foreign legal fees and taxes there — evenly with Angela once it sells.

This was not a clean win for either sister, and it was presented to both of them that way from the start. Angela gave up her equal claim to what could turn out to be the more valuable half of the estate if the property sells for more than the rough estimate suggested, in exchange for money in hand now instead of an open-ended wait. Jasleen took on the ongoing administrative burden and the financial risk of fronting foreign costs before any reimbursement, in exchange for keeping full authority over how that side of the estate was handled. Neither sister got everything she originally expected, but both walked away from the arrangement with something they could live with, and with a written record protecting each of them if a dispute arose later.

The foreign property remains in the local succession process at the time of writing, moving at the pace that jurisdiction's system moves at. Jasleen checks in periodically. Angela gets the same updates directly from Jasleen under the terms of their agreement, which has, so far, kept the arrangement from curdling back into the mistrust that brought them to Treadstone Law in the first place.

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