Guide · Migration

Taking over a portfolio from another agent

Winning the instruction is the easy part. The month that follows is where agencies lose money they never see, because inherited data arrives incomplete, disputed, or already deducted from — and every one of those problems surfaces as your fault.

What to ask for before you agree to anything

Ask while you still have leverage, which is before the landlord has told their current agent they're leaving. Afterwards, cooperation tends to evaporate.

• A closing statement per property, showing the balance held on the landlord's behalf at the handover date.
• Arrears per unit, aged, with the date each debt arose — not a single figure per tenant.
• Whether withholding has been applied to those arrears, and up to what date.
• The lease documents, or at minimum the term, rent, review date and deposit held for each unit.
• Tenant contact details — phone and email, per tenant.
• Deposits: how much is held, by whom, and whether it is actually there.

You will not get all six. Getting four is a good outcome. What matters is knowing which two are missing before you commit to a start date.

Opening balances are the whole risk

Everything after cutover is ordinary bookkeeping. The dangerous moment is the one where historic figures enter your records, because that is the only point at which a number can arrive without anything behind it.

An opening balance typed into a field is an assertion. It has no date, no source and nothing to reconcile against, and the first tenant who disputes it will expose that. The alternative is to bring balances in as a dated journal that has to balance to zero before it is accepted — every brought-forward figure with an entry behind it and a date it came from, on day one.

The one that actually costs money: deducting twice

Arrears that arrive from a previous agent have, in most cases, already had withholding applied. If they are loaded as ordinary new charges, your system treats them as fresh income and deducts again when they're paid.

The landlord is then short, quietly, and the error compounds across every unit with brought-forward arrears. It is rarely caught early, because each individual statement is internally consistent — the mistake is upstream of the arithmetic.

The fix is structural rather than procedural: brought-forward figures must be marked as pre-cutover at the moment they're imported, so nothing downstream can treat them as new money. A note in a handover document does not survive staff turnover. A flag on the row does.

The gap nobody plans for

In most portfolios we see, phone numbers or email addresses are missing for the majority of tenants. Sometimes they were never collected; more often they lived in a departed employee's phone.

You can load the money without them. What you cannot do is send anyone a statement, give anyone a login, or chase arrears by any means other than physically visiting. That turns a modern system into a filing cabinet, and it is entirely avoidable — but only if you find out during the handover rather than in week three.

A sane order of operations

1. Load everything into a dry run first. Nothing written. You want a report on the data — what matched, what didn't, and every ambiguity nobody should be guessing at.
2. Resolve the ambiguities with the landlord, not internally. Which duplicate tenant is real, who owns the two units with no owner recorded, which rent figure is current. These are their facts.
3. Agree the cutover date in writing, including who collects rent that arrives on the boundary. Payments landing on the wrong side of a handover are a predictable dispute.
4. Post opening balances as a journal, dated, marked pre-cutover, balancing to zero.
5. Run one full rent cycle before you promise anything. Charges raised, payments matched, statements produced. If something is wrong, it will show up here — cheaply.