A Florida Condo Turned One Ontario Estate Into Two Probates

The situation

Ines called our office about six weeks after her mother's death. The estate looked simple on paper: a modest house in Wasaga Beach, a car, some savings, and a will that named Ines, her brother Ramon and her sister Cristina as equal beneficiaries and Ines as estate trustee. Ines had already found the original will in a kitchen drawer and assumed the rest would be paperwork.

Then Ramon mentioned the condo. Their mother had bought a small unit in Florida almost ten years earlier, a place she rented out most of the year and used herself for a few weeks each winter. It was titled in her name alone, held the same way as everything else she owned, and it did not appear anywhere in the will beyond a general clause leaving "all my property" to the three of them. Nobody had thought about what that meant until Ines tried to find out how to sell it.

Ramon drives long-haul routes across Ontario and the northeastern United States and was used to crossing the border for work, but not to dealing with US property law. Cristina works as a factory technician and had never handled an estate before. Between them, they had assumed that a will probated in Ontario would settle everything the mother owned, wherever it was located. That assumption is one of the most common — and costliest — misunderstandings in cross-border estates.

What the review found

A will made in Ontario, and an Ontario grant of probate (formally a certificate of appointment of estate trustee, issued by the Superior Court), gives the estate trustee authority over property in Ontario. It does not automatically give that trustee authority to sell or transfer real estate sitting in another country. Real property is generally governed by the law of the place where it sits, not the law of the deceased's home province. For US real estate owned by a Canadian who has died, that usually means a separate court process in the US state where the property is located — commonly called ancillary probate — is needed before the property can be sold or transferred, even where an Ontario will already deals with it.

We confirmed the condo was titled solely in the mother's name, with no joint owner and no beneficiary designation attached to the deed. That ruled out the two most common ways cross-border property avoids a second probate: joint ownership with right of survivorship, or a trust structure holding the property instead of the individual. Neither had been set up, which meant the Florida court process was unavoidable.

We also flagged a second issue the family had not considered: non-residents who own US property can be subject to US estate tax exposure on that property, separate from anything owed in Canada, depending on the value of the US assets and the deceased's overall US-situated holdings. The condo's value was modest, in the range of roughly $130,000 to $150,000, and after review this did not create a significant US estate tax bill on its own — but it was a real question that had to be checked, not assumed away, and checking it took time and a specialist opinion the estate had to pay for.

The Ontario side of the estate was worth roughly $300,000 once the house, savings and car were accounted for. Combined with the Florida condo, the whole estate came to somewhere around $440,000 to $460,000 — squarely within what the three siblings had expected to receive, until the cost of untangling the US property started eating into it.

What we did

1. Separated the two estates conceptually before touching either. We treated the Ontario assets and the Florida condo as two distinct administrative tracks from the start, so delays on one side would not hold up distribution of the other. Ines applied for and received the Ontario certificate of appointment for the house, savings and car while the Florida question was still being worked through.
2. Engaged Florida counsel for the ancillary probate. Ontario lawyers are not licensed to appear in US courts or give US legal advice, so we brought in a Florida probate lawyer to open the ancillary proceeding there. Our role was to coordinate: making sure the Ontario grant, the will, and the required supporting documents were properly authenticated and sent to Florida in the form their court would accept, and keeping the siblings updated in plain language as two lawyers in two countries worked in parallel.
3. Obtained a US estate tax opinion before distributing anything from the condo's sale. Rather than assume the value was too small to matter, we had the question answered properly. The opinion confirmed no US estate tax filing obligation applied given the size of the US-situated assets, which let the family move forward with the sale without that risk hanging over them.
4. Coordinated the sale and the currency conversion. Once the Florida court appointed Ines as the personal representative for the US proceeding, the condo was listed and sold. We worked with the family's accountant on the US-dollar-to-Canadian-dollar conversion and on reporting the foreign property and its sale correctly on the estate's Canadian tax filings, since foreign property held by a Canadian estate carries its own disclosure obligations.
5. Reconciled and distributed only after both tracks closed. We held final distribution until the Ontario estate accounts and the Florida sale proceeds were both finalized, so Ines was not distributing funds to Ramon and Cristina prematurely and then discovering a shortfall from unpaid Florida fees or taxes later.

The outcome

The estate settled, and all three siblings received their share, but not the share they had originally expected. The Ontario portion of the estate, worth roughly $300,000, moved through in a reasonably ordinary timeline of several months. The Florida condo took closer to a year from the date Ines first called our office to the date its sale proceeds were finally distributed, once the ancillary probate process, the tax opinion and the sale itself were all accounted for.

The condo sold for roughly $140,000. By the time Florida court costs, the ancillary probate lawyer's fees, the US tax opinion, and currency conversion costs were subtracted, the amount that actually reached the estate for distribution was closer to $105,000 to $110,000 — a loss of somewhere around $30,000 to $35,000 off the property's sale price, entirely attributable to the extra layer of process a cross-border asset requires. None of that money was lost to a mistake; it was the unavoidable cost of a second legal system getting involved after the fact, rather than a structure being put in place beforehand that could have avoided it.

Ramon, in particular, had budgeted around the full expected value of his share for a truck he was planning to buy for his route, and had to adjust that plan once the real numbers came through partway into the process. Cristina had less riding on the timeline and was more affected by the uncertainty of not knowing, for months, what her share would actually be. Ines, as estate trustee, carried the administrative weight of managing two legal processes at once, on top of grieving her mother, and said afterward that the hardest part was not the money but not knowing for a long stretch what the outcome would even look like.

What kept the loss contained rather than worse was acting properly at each step rather than trying to shortcut the Florida process. Some families in this situation try to sell a US property informally, through a relative present at the location, without a proper ancillary proceeding — which can leave a sale legally unenforceable and create far larger problems later, including title disputes for the buyer. Doing it correctly cost more upfront than doing it improperly would have looked like, but it produced a clean, defensible result the family could rely on.

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