As a Property Manager or Real Estate Agent, you understand the importance of finding property management software that best suits your needs.
With the right platform, you can effectively manage each property and client in your database to ensure your agency maintains your high standards of customer satisfaction, retain ongoing business and strengthen your brand’s reputation.
However, when it comes to migrating your existing property management data from one platform to another, it can be quite a daunting and confusing process, especially without the right guidance or an adequate plan in place. This can lead to simply choosing to stick to what you know, despite using software that no longer reasonably serves your needs.
For this reason, we’ve put together a list of useful tips to help you as you look to migrate your customer data and rent roll to a new and more effective property management software solution.
8 helpful tips for successful property management data migration
1. Plan, plan and plan some more
When it comes to data migration, it pays to develop a solid plan of action that will enable you to adequately prepare your business to make the switch to your new property management software solution.
Some things to plan include:
- Timeframes and key dates
- Milestones and KPIs
- Requirements and responsibilities
- Task lists
- Training
- Launch dates
By working together with your new software provider, you can gain a thorough understanding of what each stage of the transition will involve, allowing you to prepare accordingly and avoid any surprises along the way.
2. Communicate with your team
By keeping your whole team regularly informed and up to date during the migration process, you can eliminate uncertainty and instead generate excitement for what’s to come. After all, a new piece of software often comes with a long list of new capabilities, fresh features and a host of different options that can help make their daily tasks simpler and easier.
You can even ask your employees to help at different stages of the transition to encourage buy-in.
3. Educate your team
As part of ensuring a smooth transition to new business software, you need to provide comprehensive educational opportunities for your staff to allow them to become familiar with the features of the new platform and learn how to perform daily tasks with efficiency and ease.
Again, by working closely with your software provider, you can hold training days or facilitate online learning sessions to help ensure minimal disruption to your team’s workflow once the new system is in place.
For instance, at PropertyMe, agencies receive 24/7 access to our Knowledge Base guides, which include great training videos, articles, resources and more. We also hold monthly lunch & learns to keep the whole team updated on the latest productivity hacks and software tips.
4. Run trial migrations
Performing multiple trial migrations before the real thing will allow you to identify and solve any issues you may have with your data or the migration process ahead of time—without risking extensive data loss or downtime.
Doing so will also help to give you a better understanding of how each stage of the data migration process will play out, as well as the amount of time the actual transition is going to take.
5. Clean up your data
When multiple members of your team are responsible for data entry, it’s natural for your database to gather inconsistencies, repeat entries and other errors over time.
That’s why preparing to migrate to a new platform is the perfect opportunity to review and clean up your existing data before moving it across. Think of it as a timely spring clean. This is made especially easy when you run trial migrations, as these will point out any errors or issues straight away without you having to manually scan through your entire database.
6. Plan for downtime
During the migration process, downtime is inevitable. That’s why it’s important to develop a plan that will enable you to continue to carry out essential tasks while your database is inaccessible, such as switching to manual or paper methods during the downtime period.
This is another reason why trial migrations are so important, as they allow you to accurately predict how long your downtime will last so you can make alternate arrangements.
7. Perform final checks
Running through a final checklist once your migration is complete will help you to determine whether the transition was a success and if all data came across as intended.
Likewise, performing a final check before beginning the migration process will provide peace of mind that everything has been prepared accordingly and the migration should go ahead as expected.
8. Get the help of an expert
As with anything new, the biggest challenge that you will face is not having a clear understanding of your new property management software or the migration process. That’s why it’s always best to seek the help of an expert, such as our team of migration specialists at PropertyMe.
When you move to PropertyMe, we take care of the entire migration process for you—which we call Our Onboarding Journey. As part of this, we ensure all data is successfully moved across and your business and team members are adequately trained and prepared to work with the PropertyMe software solution.
The benefits of migrating to PropertyMe
At PropertyMe, our unique Onboarding Journey migration process makes it simple for you and your team to make the switch to our superior property management software.
With PropertyMe, you get:
Transparent pricing
We offer simple, easy to understand pricing with no hidden costs and no lock-in contracts. With our pricing slider, you can see exactly how much PropertyMe will cost you.
MigrateMe
Our data migration tool, MigrateMe, enables you to easily migrate all of your existing data across to our platform, including properties, tenants, owners, creditors, financial ledgers, maintenance, inspections, tasks, images, documents, current reconciliation and more.
PropertyMe Cloud Concierge
As a single point of contact for your entire Onboarding Journey, your PropertyMe Cloud Concierge will provide you with a customised implementation plan and point-to-point checklist to ensure the smooth migration of your data. Plus, once the migration is complete, they will work with you for the first month to ensure everything continues to run smoothly for your business.
Ready to begin your seamless Onboarding Journey?
At PropertyMe, we make migrating your data to our property management software seamless so you can focus on what matters most: your clients and your business.
Our software is the most feature-rich cloud property management solution in Australia. With an easy-to-use interface, automated workflows, mobile app and simple client access, you’ll have everything you need to manage your properties with ease.
Contact our product specialists to start your Onboarding Journey with PropertyMe today!
