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Migration · Yardi to AppFolio
The demo went well. The pricing works. Then someone asks what happens to eleven years of tenant ledgers, prepaid balances, and security deposit history — and the room goes quiet. That question is the whole migration.
Yardi holds more than most people realize, and it does not hand it over in one clean file. Getting out intact is an extraction problem before it is an import problem.
Yardi does not offer a single "export everything" button. Depending on whether you're on Voyager or Breeze, data comes out through some combination of report exports, the Yardi Interface / YSI data feeds, custom SQL views against your database, and — for anything the reports don't reach — screen-level extraction. Part of the assessment is determining which of those channels you actually have access to under your contract, because that decides both what's recoverable and what the migration costs.
Each of these gets its own record count in the assessment and its own line in the reconciliation report. Depth of history is a scope decision made with real numbers in front of you, not an assumption baked into a quote.
Properties, units, and unit configuration
Property records, unit numbers, unit types, square footage, amenity flags, and market rents. The structural layer everything else hangs off — it gets built and validated first.
Residents and lease history
Current residents, past residents, lease terms, renewal chains, move-in and move-out dates, and the occupancy history that determines whether your reporting still makes sense after cutover.
Tenant ledgers and balances
Open charges, credits, prepaid rent, and current balances — reconciled to the dollar against a Yardi-side control report before anything is loaded. Depth of transaction history is a scope decision, not an assumption.
Security deposits
Held amounts, deposit type, and the interest-bearing designation where applicable. Deposits are the single most-audited number in a property migration; they get their own reconciliation.
Owners, vendors, and 1099 data
Owner records, ownership splits, vendor master with W-9 / 1099 flags, and the payable history needed to close the year cleanly.
Work orders and maintenance history
Open work orders always. Closed history to whatever depth is worth paying to carry — for most operators that is two to three years.
Documents and attachments
Signed leases, addenda, inspection reports, and correspondence, remapped to the right resident and property record on the AppFolio side rather than dumped into a shared folder.
Written down before you spend anything, because the alternative is finding out in week six. This list is specific to Yardi to AppFolio; the assessment turns it into your list, with record counts attached.
— Yardi's general ledger detail does not survive as a like-for-like transaction history in AppFolio. In practice you carry balances forward and keep Yardi in read-only archive mode for prior-period GL reporting. Anyone who tells you otherwise has not tried to close a year on the far side of it.
— Custom Yardi reports do not migrate. They have to be rebuilt against AppFolio's reporting, and that is a separate piece of work.
— Anything living in a Yardi module you don't have export rights to under your contract — that's a licensing wall, not a technical one, and it gets identified in the assessment rather than discovered at cutover.
— Screen-level formatting of free-text notes. The text moves; the formatting usually doesn't.
— Yardi's internal record IDs. AppFolio issues its own. Any external system keyed to a Yardi ID needs a mapping table, which I produce as part of the migration and hand to you.
None of this is in either vendor's documentation. It is the category of thing that looks fine in a test load and produces a wrong number in month two, which is why the process puts a full sandbox load and a reconciliation you sign in front of any production cutover.
01
Yardi's recurring charge setup and AppFolio's are structured differently enough that a naive one-to-one map produces the right first month and the wrong second month. This gets tested against a full billing cycle in the sandbox before it goes anywhere near production.
02
The cutover date and the billing date interact. Migrating on the wrong day of the month means either double-charging residents or missing a cycle. The cutover schedule is set around your billing calendar, not around whichever weekend is convenient.
03
If you operate in a state that requires interest-bearing deposit accounts, accrued interest is a separate figure from the held deposit and has to be carried explicitly. It is routinely lost in DIY migrations and it is a compliance problem, not a data problem.
04
The same person renting at two properties frequently exists as two unrelated Yardi records. Deciding whether to merge or preserve them is a business decision that has to be made before the mapping is signed off, not after the load.
01 — 02
A read-only audit of your Yardi instance produces record counts, a risk register, and a fixed quote. Then a field-by-field mapping document you sign before any code runs.
03 — 04
The complete migration runs into a AppFolio sandbox — not a sample. You spot-check records you choose, and sign a written reconciliation. If the counts don't tie, we don't cut over.
05 — 06
Scheduled around your calendar with the rollback plan written in advance, followed by 30 days of included corrections for the things that only surface in real use.
Single-property or small-portfolio moves usually land in Standard Migration. Multi-property portfolios, multiple Yardi databases, or anything with more than three years of ledger history to carry generally land in Complex. The assessment is what makes a fixed migration price possible, and its fee is credited toward the migration if you proceed.
Tier
Scope
Price
Migration Assessment
A read-only audit of your source system.
$1,500 – $2,500
Standard Migration
One source system to one destination.
$6,500 – $15,000
Complex / Multi-Entity Migration
Multiple locations, systems, or long history.
$18,000 – $40,000
Sometimes, and it depends entirely on what access remains. If you still have database access or an active export path, yes. If your instance has been fully decommissioned and all you hold is PDF reports, the honest answer is that recovery is partial and expensive — and I will tell you that in the assessment rather than after you have paid for a full migration. Start the assessment before you cancel Yardi, not after.
AppFolio's onboarding team will import data you give them in their templates, and they do that part well. What they do not do is get the data out of Yardi, decide what a Yardi field means, clean fifteen years of inconsistent entry, or reconcile the result. That gap is the work. The two efforts are complementary — I hand their onboarding team clean, validated files in their format.
For a Standard migration, you are not — cutover is a scheduled weekend, with Yardi kept in read-only for archive reporting. For Complex engagements a parallel-run period of one to two billing cycles is normal and is priced into the engagement.
Historical owner statements stay where they were generated. Going forward they come out of AppFolio. What migrates is the ownership structure and the balances the statements are built from — which is what makes the first AppFolio statement correct.
The assessment is the read-only audit — what data exists, what is extractable, what will be lost, and a fixed-price quote for the migration itself. It is priced at $1,500 – $2,500 depending on scope, fixed before anything starts, and the report is yours whether or not you go further.
Tell me what you're moving. I read every one of these personally and reply within one business day, usually with a couple of specific questions about your source system — the answers change the price, so it's worth asking early.
Nothing is committed by this form. No payment, no contract, no scheduling sequence. It starts a conversation.
If your destination vendor can handle it, I'll say so. Some conversions genuinely don't need an independent migration.
Standard
Easy extraction, so scope is the risk.
Complex
Enterprise scale and module sprawl.
Every pair
Twenty-odd pairs are written up across seven industries — and the written ones are not the limit of the work. Search the full list, or just ask.
Yardi and AppFolio are trademarks of their respective owners. This page describes independent data migration work involving those systems and does not imply any affiliation with, partnership with, or endorsement by either vendor.
Before you give notice on Yardi
The most expensive mistake in this category is losing source-system access before the extraction is done. The assessment is read-only, fixed-price, and yours to keep either way.
I respond personally within 1 business day. No pitch — just a real conversation.