Migrate from Salesforce to a real estate CRM without losing data

Why teams leave Salesforce

Salesforce is a general-purpose platform that many real estate businesses configure with custom objects or partner products. Teams often move away when licence costs rise, administration needs a specialist or the interface is more than agents will use. See our Salesforce comparison.

Before you start

• Check your contract end date and notice period
• Identify who administers the system and what customisations exist
• Decide what history you need: all activity or the last 12 to 24 months

Step-by-step migration

1. Inventory objects. List Leads, Contacts, Accounts, Opportunities, Tasks, Events and any custom objects.
2. Export data. Use Salesforce reports or data export tools to produce CSV files for each object.
3. Clean. Remove duplicates, fix phone formats and standardise country codes.
4. Map fields. Create a sheet that matches each Salesforce field to a destination field. Convert picklist values to pipeline stages and tags.
5. Handle activity history. If detailed history will not import as activity, bring it across as a note on each contact.
6. Import a test batch of 100 records and check results.
7. Import everything and verify counts.
8. Run in parallel for one to two weeks before cancelling.

Our data migration guide gives a general version of this process, and the importer reads varied file layouts.

Pitfalls

Owner mapping (who owns which record), lost custom fields and unlinked contacts and accounts are the most common problems. Decide how companies and contacts will relate before you import.

Related

Read the CRM vs spreadsheet guide for data discipline, and HubSpot migration if you use that instead.