I talked to David Mintz about CRM migrations. We ended up talking about something much bigger.

"We'll fix it later."

It sounds harmless. In estate agency, it often sounds sensible, there's always something more urgent demanding attention. A landlord to call back. A tenancy to renew. A compliance deadline that appeared from nowhere.

So the data issue gets noted. The process gap gets acknowledged. The CRM problem gets flagged in a meeting and then quietly carried forward to next week's agenda, where it will be flagged again.

The trouble is that some problems don't stay quietly in the corner.

Why "later" is more expensive than it looks

I was recently invited by David Mintz to talk about CRM migrations, not the technology, but what's really underneath them. We ended up talking about something that comes up in almost every client conversation I have.

The assumption that preparation can be an afterthought.

Most estate agencies approach a CRM migration as an administrative exercise. Move the data across. Train the team. Go live. Done.

What they don't account for is everything that lives underneath the data. The relationships between records. The fields that mean different things depending on who created them. The processes that were never documented because they existed in someone's head. The workarounds that became load-bearing without anyone noticing.

None of this is visible on the surface. All of it matters when you move.

The cost that shows up later

The hidden cost of poor migration preparation almost never appears on day one.

Go live happens. Things mostly work. And then, over the weeks and months that follow, the real cost starts to accumulate.

The team spending hours correcting data that didn't transfer cleanly. Reports that don't quite balance. Landlords asking questions that take longer to answer than they should because the information is somewhere in the old system that's technically still running. A compliance deadline that nearly gets missed because a certificate renewal didn't migrate across properly.

None of this is dramatic; it's just all expensive- in your staff's time, in client confidence, and occasionally in the kind of conversation nobody wants to have.

The businesses that avoid this aren't lucky. They're prepared. They treated the migration as the significant operational event it actually is, not an administrative task to be managed around everything else.

The decisions we make under pressure

What David and I talked about, and what I think sits underneath all of this, is how estate agencies make decisions under pressure.

"We'll fix it later" is almost never said carelessly. It's said by people who are genuinely busy, genuinely trying to keep everything running, and making a reasonable call about where to direct their attention right now.

The problem is that some decisions compound quietly. The data issue that didn't get fixed before the migration becomes the data issue that's now inside the new system. The process gap that wasn't documented becomes the process gap that the new starter falls into six months later. The workaround that felt temporary in year one becomes the thing the whole operation depends on in year three.

"Later" turns into "this is just how it is."

What proper preparation actually looks like

It's not complicated. But it does require treating a migration as a project that deserves proper attention before go live day, not just on it.

It means understanding your data before you move it, knowing what's clean, what isn't, and what will cause problems in the new system if it travels across unchanged.

It means documenting the processes that currently live in people's heads, so they survive the transition and can be followed consistently afterwards.

It means having a clear plan for the exceptions, the records that don't fit neatly, the data that needs decisions, the workarounds that need either formalising or replacing.

And it means being honest about the things you've been meaning to fix. Because the migration is the moment when "later" either finally arrives, or gets locked into your new system for another three years.

At Russou, this is the work we do alongside lettings agencies and estate agencies going into a migration. Not just the technical side, the foundational side. The conversations that make the difference between a migration that costs you once and one that keeps costing you.

If you're planning a CRM migration and want to make sure "we'll fix it later" doesn't follow you into the new system, let's talk.

Book a 20-minute migration audit at russou.co.uk

Clarice.