Client handover template for Real estate

The client handover with the items an agency cannot afford to lose: every campaign still running against a live listing, the vendor agreements behind them, the photography and who owns it, and the portal and office integrations everything depends on.

Everything else is the general handover, unchanged. One row per item, named exactly, verified from the receiving side, with ownership distinguished from access.

Use it when an office changes agency, brings advertising in-house, or loses the coordinator who built everything. In an agency the account is a live workload rather than a stable structure, and the handover has to cover campaigns that are mid-flight with money already committed.

Start it weeks ahead, and expect the live listings to be the hardest part.

Most handovers transfer a stable thing. An agency handover transfers a live workload: a dozen campaigns mid-flight, each funded by a different vendor, each running to a fixed date that cannot move while anybody sorts out permissions.

That changes the order of work. The first item is not the ad account, it is the list of campaigns currently spending, matched against the vendor agreements that fund them and the budget each has left.

Producing that list is usually the moment both sides discover something: a campaign still running against a property that sold, a listing whose agreement has been exhausted, a campaign with no agreement anybody can find. Each of those is a finding and each needs a decision before the handover date rather than after it.

The reconciliation is simple and it is the row that matters most.

For each campaign spending today: which listing, which vendor agreement, how much of that agreement has been spent, how much remains, and when the fixed date falls. Where a campaign cannot be matched to an agreement, the office is either unable to report that spend or is funding it unknowingly.

Campaigns for sold or withdrawn listings should be ended rather than transferred. Handing one over passes on a problem dressed as an asset, and the receiving side will discover it in their first audit and reasonably ask why.

The second item is the imagery, and it is more complicated here than in most categories because it usually sits with a supplier.

Record the arrangement: whether the office owns the images outright, holds a licence, or has a per-listing right that expires. Record where the files are, in what resolution, and whether the source files or only the delivered exports are available. Name the photographer and the terms.

A successor who inherits exports with no licence and no relationship cannot re-crop for a new placement, cannot reuse an image for a market-presence campaign, and cannot commission the same look for the next listing. All three are avoidable with one row.

Most enquiry journeys in this category pass through a portal, and the connection between the portal, the office's own system and the advertising is usually configured once by somebody who then moves on.

List each integration: what connects to what, who holds the credentials, what it does, and how you would know if it stopped. The last part matters because these break silently: an enquiry feed that stops delivering produces no error, only a quiet week.

Verify from the receiving side by sending a test enquiry through each path after the transfer and confirming it arrives.

Some things being handed over are promises rather than assets.

A campaign already sold to a vendor but not yet started. A reporting commitment at the end of a campaign. A package that includes a certain number of weeks or a particular placement. A discount agreed for a repeat client.

Each is a row in the obligations category, with its date and its terms, because the successor will be the one asked to honour it and they will be asked without warning.

The notes column in this category carries something specific and valuable: what the office has learned about its own corridors.

Which suburbs need a wider radius. What a campaign in each bracket has historically cost. Which placements produce inspections rather than enquiries. Which portals are worth the money in which market. Which stages of a sale have been worth extra weight.

None of that is in an ad account, all of it took a year of campaigns to learn, and it is the difference between a successor who runs the next listing well and one who starts from generic assumptions.

Agency accounts are frequently administered by one coordinator, which makes them exactly the accounts most likely to be orphaned.

The access-after column should name at least two current people for every account, page, portal integration and payment method. Where the office has historically depended on one person, the handover is the moment to fix that rather than to reproduce it.

Also record the payment method and its expiry. A campaign that stops mid-flight because a card expired is the kind of failure a vendor remembers.

The agency's own market-presence campaigns belong in the handover as their own category, kept apart from the listing campaigns for the same reason they are kept apart everywhere else.

They are funded differently, judged differently and usually structured differently. A handover that folds them into the listing rows leaves a successor unable to tell which spend was the office's own, which makes the first month's reporting either wrong or a manual exercise.

List them separately, with what they were for, what they were judged on, and what the office believes they have produced. The last part is usually the weakest evidence in the whole handover, and saying so honestly is more useful than a confident claim nobody can support.

Seven checks. Items are listed by category and named with identifiers. Every live campaign is matched to a current vendor agreement, with the remaining budget and the fixed date recorded. Campaigns for sold or withdrawn listings have been ended rather than transferred. Photography ownership and licence terms are recorded, with the photographer named. Every portal and office integration has been tested with a real enquiry after transfer. Obligations already sold to vendors are listed with their dates. And at least two current people can administer everything, including the payment method.