A real estate agency had run on Salesforce and Propertybase for ten years. On paper it worked: every listing, contact, and deal lived in one system, and the team knew it well.
The problem was the bill. Year after year they paid thousands for a platform whose features they had mostly outgrown, and the longer they stayed, the more it held. By the time they wanted to leave, the system carried a decade of their business: around 1,600 properties, 7,000 contacts, and every offer, demand, task and email behind them. 68,000 records in all.
Then there were the photos. About 29,000 property images, 8.8 GB of them. Propertybase runs on Salesforce, and Salesforce doesn’t let you pull image files out the easy way. Your records come out as spreadsheets, but the actual photos sit behind a structure you have to script your way through. For most agencies, that single fact is what makes leaving feel impossible. The data they care about most is the data the platform makes hardest to take.
So the subscription wasn’t really buying features anymore. It was buying continued access to work they had already created. That is rent on your own history.
What we did was get it back
- We scripted a full export of the account: all 68,000 records across the decade, plus all 29,000 photos, pulled out and checked against the originals.
- We turned it into an archive they host themselves: browsable like a CRM, with each property exporting to a clean PDF dossier in the languages their listings actually used.
- We structured it to meet the records they are legally required to keep in Spain, so the archive does double duty as compliance, not just backup.
The subscription is gone. The data sits on their own server now, theirs to keep, with no monthly fee to read their own history.
This was Propertybase, but the trap is the same across every CRM and platform that makes your data easy to put in and hard to take out. The cost of leaving is engineered, not real. With the right export, it comes down.
Is your business paying for software, or paying so you don’t lose access to what you already built?
