Moving to Ace from Another System: What Imports and How Consent Works

Updated August 13, 2026

Moving tools is usually a data problem. Moving client tools is a consent problem wearing a data problem's clothes — and that is the part most migrations get wrong. This article covers what carries over into Ace, what you re-create, and the one rule that governs all of it: an import moves records, never permission.

What you'll have when you're done

A clear picture of which of your existing lists can come across, and in what shape.
An understanding of why every imported contact lands in a non-sending state, and what unlocks it.
The import → review → invite sequence, so you know what will and will not happen when you press the button.
A realistic expectation for what the first week after a migration looks like.

The one rule

A subscriber list from another product is that product's consent, not yours. Ace will import the people. It will not inherit their permission to be emailed. Every imported record arrives in a state where automated sending is off, and the only thing that turns it on is the person themselves saying yes to you.

This is not caution for its own sake. A migrated list that starts mailing on day one is the single fastest way to get an agent's domain flagged as spam, and — depending on what the other product's opt-in actually said — it is the kind of thing that draws a complaint. Ace is built so that the safe path is also the default path.

What carries over, tool by tool

The Home Almanac import review step, showing per-row outcomes — matched, created, skipped and rejected with the reason — before anything is committed

Coming from	Into	What you get — and what you don't
Homebot or another home-value product	Home Almanac	Homeowners and addresses import; each gets a page and one invite. Not imported: their subscription. Every home starts unsubscribed and stays there until the homeowner opts in on their own page.
Curb Hero, Spacio, or paper sign-in sheets	Ace Forms	Sign-ins backfill into a form you choose and reach Follow Up Boss. Not imported: any consent to automated email. Backfilled sign-ins are excluded from automated sends entirely — you work them by hand.
Zillow or another agent-profile directory	Ace Pages	Nothing to import: pages build themselves from your Follow Up Boss roster and your own deals. You paste your bio and your testimonials. Not imported: your star rating — Ace does not scrape review sites and publishes no rating.
A spreadsheet of agent commission terms	Back Office	Plans import with a required effective-from date per row, and a dry run shows the ledger delta before you commit. No consent implications — this is internal data.
Your Follow Up Boss database itself	Everything	Already there. Ace reads your contacts, deals, activity and stages through the Follow Up Boss connection — there is no contact import step, and there never was.

Import → review → invite

Every importer in Ace has the same three beats. There is no variant where step four is "and then it emails everyone."

Import. You upload a CSV. Ace matches each row to a Follow Up Boss contact — by email — and creates the contact when there is no match, so Follow Up Boss stays the system of record and nothing ends up living only inside Ace.
Review. You see a per-row outcome before anything is committed: matched, created, skipped, or rejected with the reason. A row Ace can't validate is shown to you, not quietly coerced into something that looks valid. Where an import needs a human to vouch for where the data came from, you attest by name and that attestation is stored with the records.
Invite — or nothing. The Home Almanac import sends the same single transactional invite a hand-enrolled home would get. The open-house backfill sends nothing at all. Neither one starts a campaign.

The Home Almanac send-readiness summary just after a bulk import, with almost every home in the have-not-opted-in-yet bucket

What the first week actually looks like

Set expectations with yourself before you import, because the numbers will look worse than the migration went:

Your readiness summary will be mostly un-opted-in. If you import 300 homes, expect roughly 300 rows sitting in have not opted in yet the next morning. Opt-ins arrive over days as invites are opened.
Some homes will never become eligible. A home with no defensible equity estimate — common in non-disclosure states where no purchase price is public — will not send rather than have Ace model a number. That is permanent unless you have your own closed transaction on the property.
New accounts ramp. Ace deliberately does not blast a whole book on the first run; volume builds up over successive runs. Homes over a run's cap roll to the next one.
Backfilled open-house sign-ins will never appear in a send count, because they are not in the sending population at all. They are CRM records you work personally.

Honest limitations

There is no direct connector to any competing product. Migration is CSV in, reviewed, committed. Nothing logs into your old tool on your behalf.
Ace does not buy, scrape or append third-party data — no purchased life-event lists, no divorce or probate filings, no scraped reviews. The home profile comes from public records and from what the homeowner fills in themselves.
An import cannot manufacture consent, and no setting changes that. There is deliberately no toggle that marks imported homeowners as subscribed. If you find yourself wanting one, the honest move is a personal message pointing your client at their page.
Stored lead records do not expire on a timer. They carry an expiry marker, but nothing automatically purges them — deletion requests are handled by hand. Never tell a client their data auto-deletes on a schedule.

Frequently asked questions

My old product says these people opted in. Why do I have to ask again?
Because they opted in to that product's mail, from that sender. Consent doesn't transfer with a CSV. The invite makes asking again cheap: one message, and the ones who want it say yes.

Can support flip my imported homeowners to subscribed?
No. There is no mechanism, and it isn't a permissions question — nothing in the product writes that consent on a homeowner's behalf.

Will importing create duplicate contacts in Follow Up Boss?
Rows are matched by email first and only create a contact when there's no match. Review the per-row outcomes before committing — that is exactly what the dry run is for.

Do I lose my history if I don't import?
Your Follow Up Boss history is already in Ace. What an importer adds is the external stuff Follow Up Boss never held: homeowner addresses, and sign-ins collected in another product.

Can I import my Zillow reviews?
No. Ace does not scrape or ingest review-site content. Enter testimonials yourself; they are labeled as agent-provided.

Last updated: August 2026

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