Woods Homes was changing CRM, from Apex27 to Street. That alone meant updating the property data behind its website, Property AdVantage and Google Business Profile automation.

But before Apex27 was switched off, we asked a different question: what marketing value was sitting inside it that a straightforward migration would simply leave behind?

The answer was 31,888 historic contacts, built up across sales applicants, vendors, landlords and tenants over years of trading.

Property AdVantage is Estate Apps' Meta advertising service for estate and letting agents. The Premium tier goes a step further than Standard by also turning an agency's CRM contact history into dedicated, targeted advertising audiences, alongside the property-led audiences the campaign already builds.

Client snapshot

31,888 historic contacts

• 7,759 sales applicants
• 3,021 vendors
• 769 landlords
• 20,339 tenants

These aren't 31,888 new leads. They're years of accumulated relationships and contact history that Woods Homes had already built inside Apex27, and that a routine CRM migration would ordinarily leave behind.

Preserved yesterday. Building tomorrow.

Part One of the Woods Homes story covered what Property AdVantage Standard had already achieved through property advertising alone. This is a different kind of audience: the one already sitting inside years of CRM contact history.

A CRM switch affects more than the CRM

Woods Homes was moving from Apex27 to Street. Because Estate Apps draws on CRM property data across several services, this was never going to be a simple case of pointing the website at a different system.

The underlying property data feeds three separate places:

That was the operational job: move the live property ecosystem from Apex27 to Street without interrupting Woods Homes' digital marketing.

But there was another type of data sitting inside Apex27: contact history. That needed a different approach entirely.

Before switching Apex27 off, we took a backup

Rather than focusing only on the data needed to run Street going forward, we treated the old CRM the way you'd treat any system about to be switched off: take a backup before it disappears for good.

The breakdown made the value of that backup obvious: 7,759 sales applicants, 3,021 vendors, 769 landlords and 20,339 tenants, 31,888 historic contacts in total, representing years of relationships Woods Homes had already built.

But a normal backup just sits there. It's insurance against a disaster that, hopefully, never happens. Somewhere in a folder, doing nothing, unless something goes badly wrong.

Most CRM switches never get this far. The old system gets exported, the important operational fields get carried over, and the rest, the years of contact history that don't fit neatly into the new system's setup, quietly gets left behind. Nobody decides to lose it. It just isn't anybody's job to save it.

That's not what happened here.

Turning a backup into a working audience

Until this point, Woods Homes had been running Property AdVantage Standard. The CRM migration created a specific, time-limited reason to move up to Premium.

Before Apex27 was switched off, we used its historic contact data to create four dedicated Custom Audiences within Woods Homes' own Facebook advertising account, covering sales applicants, vendors, landlords and tenants separately.

Once those audiences were established, Apex27 synchronisation was disabled. The data didn't need Apex27 to stay live any more: it could carry on doing a job inside Facebook, as an active marketing audience, rather than sitting untouched as a backup nobody would ever open.

Then Street became the live source

Once Woods Homes went live with Street, it took over the jobs that needed to continue: powering the website, Property AdVantage and Google Business Profile automation. Four new Street CRM audiences were also established, covering the same four groups, and those are now synchronising on an ongoing basis.

That gives Woods Homes' audience strategy two distinct layers, rather than one that simply replaced the other:

It's an important distinction. Woods Homes' Apex27 database hasn't been migrated into Street through Property AdVantage. Instead, the advertising opportunity within the old contact history has been preserved, while Street becomes the source of new CRM audience data going forward.

Why this is commercially interesting

The value here isn't simply having a large Facebook audience. It's the context behind the people within it.

Woods Homes knows whether somebody entered its historic database as a sales applicant, a vendor, a landlord or a tenant, which means a historic vendor audience can receive different messaging from tenants, and landlords different messaging again from sales applicants.

Those CRM-derived audiences can also sit alongside the warm audiences Woods Homes already built through its property advertising in Part One, giving Premium another dimension: people Woods Homes is discovering through its properties, and people Woods Homes already knows through its CRM history.

What this means for your agency

When an agency changes CRM, the immediate priorities are obvious: properties need to appear correctly, the website needs to work, portal feeds need to continue, and staff need access to the contacts and workflows required to run the business day to day.

All of that matters, and none of it is where the real value gets lost.

If your agency has been trading for any length of time, there's a very good chance your own CRM is sitting on a similar dormant audience right now: thousands of past applicants, vendors, landlords and tenants who already know your name, costing you nothing to keep, and earning you nothing either.

You don't need to know the exact number to know it's there. Every valuation you've ever logged, every tenant who moved on, every vendor who sold five years ago and never came back, it's all still sitting in your database. Woods Homes' answer happened to be 31,888. Yours will be a different number, but the pattern is the same.

Here's the part that makes this worth acting on rather than just nodding along to: you've already paid for that history, in the time and effort it took to build it. Turning it into a working Facebook audience simply stops that existing asset going to waste.

The catch is timing. This only works if it happens before the old CRM is switched off, not after. Once a system is decommissioned, the ability to extract and use that contact history typically goes with it, and there's no going back for it once it's gone.

For Woods Homes, asking the right question at the right moment turned a routine systems change into something extra: historic audiences preserved from the system it was leaving, and continually synchronised audiences from the system it was joining, running alongside each other rather than one replacing the other.

What happens next

This is where we stop, deliberately. Creating audiences isn't the commercial result; what those audiences go on to deliver is.

The historic Apex27 audiences are retained, the Street audiences are synchronising, and Property AdVantage Premium is now running. We'll let the strategy run for a while before returning to Woods Homes for the next instalment, when we'll look at the numbers that ultimately matter.

Frequently asked questions

What is Property AdVantage Premium?

Property AdVantage Premium is Estate Apps' advanced tier of Meta advertising for estate and letting agents. Alongside the property-led advertising in Property AdVantage Standard, it turns an agency's CRM contact history into dedicated, targeted advertising audiences.

What happens to an agency's contact history when it changes CRM?

Without specific action, historic contact history often doesn't transfer to a new CRM in a form that's useful for marketing. Estate Apps addressed this for Woods Homes by creating dedicated Facebook advertising audiences from the historic data before the old CRM was switched off, so that marketing value wasn't lost in the migration.

Does switching CRM mean losing marketing data?

It can, if the marketing value of the old CRM's contact history isn't specifically addressed as part of the migration. Woods Homes avoided this by preserving its historic Apex27 contacts as standalone advertising audiences, separate from the live data migration into Street.

Could this work for my agency, even if we're not switching CRM right now?

Yes. This isn't only relevant at the point of a CRM switch. Any agency with a CRM holding years of past applicants, vendors, landlords and tenants has a similar dormant audience sitting inside it right now, whether or not a system change is on the horizon.

Does this work with any CRM or lead platform?

It depends on the system behind your marketing. This works for full two-way CRMs, currently Street, Reapit, Apex27 and Dezrez, and also for ValPal, which has its own feed for pulling lead history out. It isn't currently available through LeadPro.

Services used

This project was delivered using: Property AdVantage, Estate Apps website design and Google Business Profile automation.

Your CRM is probably sitting on the same opportunity

Woods Homes didn't set out looking for 31,888 extra contacts. They were simply switching CRM, and we asked one extra question before the old system went dark.

Chances are your agency is sitting on the same kind of dormant value right now, whether or not a CRM switch is anywhere on your radar. Years of past applicants, vendors, landlords and tenants, already familiar with your brand, currently doing nothing for your marketing at all.

Property AdVantage Premium turns that history into targeted advertising audiences you can put back to work, alongside the property-led campaigns you're already running.

It does depend on the system behind your marketing supporting it.

If a CRM switch is coming for you, the only real risk is timing: this has to happen before the old system is switched off, not after. If one isn't on the horizon, there's nothing stopping you asking the same question about your CRM today.

Next steps

• See what Property AdVantage Premium could do with your own CRM data
• Find out how Google Business Profile automation keeps your listings visible
• Browse more results across our case studies
• Get in touch to speak to one of our team

Results reflect campaign data for Woods Homes. Individual results may vary