Migration guide · Buildium
Migrating from Buildium: what the work actually looks like
A bounded, extraction-by-resource migration with the counts and balance tie-outs agreed in writing before anything is imported — written as guidance, with the honest limits stated where they belong.
How you get your data out.
Whether you extract through the API or through report exports depends on your Buildium plan: in the research reviewed for this playbook (October 2026), API access was included with the Premium plan and not with the lower tiers. Verify your own plan and access before scheduling, and if the API is not available, plan the migration around your report exports — do not let either be described as the other.
Before anything moves
What is agreed in writing first.
- Agree the scope in writing: properties and units, current people and leases, open maintenance work, documents, custom fields, and the financial period to carry over.
- If you use the API, have an account administrator enable it and create a key scoped to the migration, held by the person responsible for the extraction, and rotated or revoked after the pull.
- If you do not use the API, use the CSV/report exports and be clear that this is what happened.
- For financial history, the practical default is open balances plus year-to-date — but you choose the scope.
The sequence
The migration, in the order it happens.
Extract the portfolio skeleton
Pull properties, units and rental owners first. These establish the mapping of source record identities that every later step hangs off.
Extract people and leases
Pull tenants, applicants and vendors, then the leases and the lease-ledger transactions the agreed balances need. Include move-outs and renewals only where they are in the agreed scope.
Extract open operations
Pull work orders and tasks. Open items are the priority; include closed history only if the agreed scope covers it.
Extract the money in scope
Pull the ledger charges and payments for open balances, plus a cutover snapshot of outstanding balances. Reconcile that snapshot against the lease ledgers before importing, or before enabling collection in Tenant Office.
Transform with an ID map, and import one slice first
Transform the extraction into the schemas the importers accept, keeping the Buildium identities alongside each row so a reviewer can trace an imported record back to its source. Import one property — or another agreed small slice — first, confirm counts, and review exceptions before expanding.
Tie out, then cut over
Agree the activity window, take the cutover-day balance snapshot, and reconcile it to the ledgers and your own reports. Only after the tie-out is accepted turn on collection in Tenant Office. Running both systems active without a tie-out can double-bill a resident.
On the Tenant Office side
What happens here, and what it leaves behind.
- Imports you run in Tenant Office keep the identifiers the records arrived with, and each import leaves a read-only reconciliation report — counts and exceptions — before any business record is written.
- A point-in-time CSV export of your portfolio, with those retained source keys and import provenance, stays available at any time. Your records remain yours to take away, with no exit fee.
Honest caveats
What this guide cannot promise.
- This guide does not describe a native Buildium integration in Tenant Office. The extraction, the transform and the review are separate, deliberate work.
- If your plan does not include API access, the migration runs on report exports, with the mapping and completeness limits that come with them.
- Some resources cannot be narrowed reliably by an updated-since filter, so financial history depth must be agreed rather than assumed.
- A successful import preview is not proof that every historical transaction, document, or external payment instruction migrated. Acceptance is for the agreed scope, agreed together, before old workflows are switched off.
- A field that has no agreed destination is a review item, never an invented value and never something silently dropped.
This guide is derived from our own migration playbook for Buildium, whose operational facts were checked against sources read in October 2026. Pricing, exports, plan terms and vendor behavior can change; verify them again when a migration is scheduled. Buildium and its product names are trademarks of their respective owners, and Tenant Office is an independent product, not affiliated with or endorsed by them.
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See it working
The honest way to evaluate a migration path is to walk one work order through, end to end, in the workspace.