Caring for a property when the owner no longer can.

When someone dies, their house does not pause. It still needs heat through the winter, water managed, snow cleared, a lawn cut, mail collected, and someone to notice when a pipe starts leaking. Probate in Alberta commonly runs six to eighteen months before a property can be dealt with, and for most of that time the house sits empty while the people responsible for it are managing grief, paperwork, and often a different city.

Executors carry a real duty here. An executor is required to preserve estate assets, and for most estates the house is the largest one. If the property deteriorates, freezes, floods or is uninsured through an unaddressed vacancy condition, the executor is the person answerable to the beneficiaries. That responsibility is easy to hold and difficult to discharge from Vancouver, Toronto or London.

Estate vacancies also carry an insurance issue that catches families off guard. A home policy may respond differently once a property is unoccupied following the death of the owner, and some policies require notification within a defined period. This is one of the first calls an executor should make, and it is a call to the insurer or broker — not something any service can resolve on the estate's behalf.

The other thing estate work needs is documentation, for reasons that are more human than legal. Families disagree. A sibling in another province wants to know the house is being looked after. A beneficiary asks what happened to the contents. A dated, photographed record of every visit and every authorised piece of work is the quietest way to answer all of it, and it is worth more than anyone expects at the time it is set up.

The tone of this work matters too. Families are often dealing with a parent's house, full of a lifetime of belongings, at the worst moment of their year. It is handled carefully and without a sales process attached.