Find how much you have
Sign in as the account owner. Exporting is on for owners by default, and an owner can turn on Can Export for other people under Admin > Teams. The owner gets an email each time an agent or admin runs an export, so tell your team before you start.
Go to People > All People and filter to everything you want counted. Follow Up Boss's API leaves contacts in the Trash stage out unless you ask for them, so decide whether trashed contacts belong in your count and keep that choice the same throughout.
Select all, click the Export arrow, tick All Columns and choose Yes, Export People. The CSV downloads at once and nothing is removed from Follow Up Boss. Without All Columns you only get each contact's name plus the columns showing on the People screen. Count the rows. That is your contact total.
In the same file, sort by the Date Added column to find your oldest contact. The All Columns file also carries stage, lead source, assigned agent, tags, notes, calls, texts, and deal stage, close date and price, which shows you which parts of the system you actually use.
For call and text activity, open Reporting and run the Calls Report and the Text Report over a long time frame, then export each to CSV. The People export only includes each contact's 50 most recent calls, texts and notes, so it understates busy contacts.
A developer can read exact totals. Every user has an API key under Admin > API, with the same access as that user, so use the owner's key. A call to the people list with limit=1 returns a total in its _metadata section. Calls and deals have list calls too. Follow Up Boss describes the text message list as being for a person or phone number, so a full text count may take one call per contact, and the appointment list only returns appointments that the key's own user created in Follow Up Boss, so it will not give an account-wide total.
What to put on your intake
Your intake has five boxes for each system. Here is what goes in each one for Follow Up Boss.
- What does it hold?
- Leads and contacts with stage, lead source, assigned agent, tags, notes, logged calls and texts, appointments, and deals with stage, close date and price. Say what your team really uses, for example buyer and seller leads with text follow-up.
- Data types
- Structured records and Text for contact fields, notes and texts. Leave Audio unticked, because Follow Up Boss says call recordings cannot be exported.
- How big is it?
- Report the number of contacts. Put call, text, appointment and deal counts in the description field if you have them from reports.
- Verified or estimated
- Verified when the number is the row count of an All People export or the total from the API, with Trash handled the same way each time. Estimated if it came from a Smart List count or from memory.
- Records start
- The earliest Date Added in the export. If you imported a database from another CRM, check whether Date Added shows the import date for those contacts and say so in the description.
Exporting the full history
If a buyer licenses your records, this is how the full history comes out of Follow Up Boss.
Nothing is exported until you have signed a license and agreed the scope: which contacts or Smart Lists, which date range, and whether notes, texts and deals are in or out.
The account owner, or a user with Can Export, exports People with All Columns, either the whole database or Smart List by Smart List. This is the main contact file. It holds up to six phones, emails and addresses per contact, up to four relationships, and each contact's latest 50 calls, 50 texts and 50 notes.
Export the reports you agree to from Reporting (Agent Activity, Lead Source, Calls, Marketing, Deals, Appointment and Text) as CSV. These are summaries, and exporting respects the user's role, so the owner should run them to see everything.
Where the 50-item cap matters, your own staff can page through the API with the owner's key instead: calls, text messages and deals, up to 100 per page, using the next cursor. Keep it in-house. Follow Up Boss requires anyone using its API to provide services to a customer to register their system, and its API Terms of Use then bar that party from licensing the data or using it to train AI models. Read the API terms caveat below before you start.
Emails and call recordings cannot be exported at all. Emails sent or received in Follow Up Boss remain in the agent's connected email account, so cover them through the Gmail or Microsoft 365 guides if they are in scope.
Contact and agent identifiers come out before anything is delivered to a buyer.
We only ask for an export after you sign a license and agree the scope. Sizing your data for the intake never needs one.
Limits to know
- Follow Up Boss says emails and call recordings cannot be exported. Emails stay in each agent's connected email account.
- The CSV has caps. Each contact's file includes only the most recent 50 calls, 50 texts and 50 notes, at most six phones, emails and addresses, and up to four relationships. If the Pond matters, add the Pond name as a tag first, because the export shows the assignment but not the name.
- Excel drops leading zeros from ZIP codes in the CSV. Follow Up Boss's article explains how to restore them with a custom number format.
- API limits apply. Rate limiting uses a sliding 10-second window. With a registered system key the global limit is 250 requests, listing events is 20 and notes are 10, and without one the limits are lower (125 global and 10 for events). Going over returns a 429 with a Retry-After header. Pages hold at most 100 records, and deep pages must use the next cursor instead of offset.
- Some call and text data is not available through the API and is only visible in the app, according to the call and text message list pages.
- A key reaches only what its owner can see. An agent's key reaches only the people assigned to that agent, while the owner's reaches everything.
- API terms may limit how API data can be shared. Follow Up Boss's Terms of Service say that if you use the API, you may not resell, license or otherwise monetize the API, or share data obtained through it with any third party except your own service providers or where the law allows. The separate API Terms of Use bar licensees from licensing that data or using it to develop or train AI or machine learning models, but they also say customers own the data they upload and that those restrictions do not apply to a customer's use of its own data. The Terms of Service clause has no such carve-out, and neither document mentions the People CSV export, so get Follow Up Boss's answer in writing before the agreed scope relies on API data.
- Appointments are hard to pull. The appointment list in the API only returns appointments created in Follow Up Boss (not synced from Google Calendar) by the user whose key is used, and only if that user shares their calendar.
- Leaving Follow Up Boss is a retention cliff. The Terms of Service say that, unless the account was terminated for your breach, you can contact support within 30 days of termination for reasonable help getting a copy of your Contact List, and that Follow Up Boss has no obligation to store or back up your data after termination. Export before you cancel.
- The same terms let Follow Up Boss use customer data that does not identify anyone, including for AI and machine learning work. Keep that in mind if a buyer asks for exclusivity.
This guide isn't legal advice. Check your contracts, and any recording-consent rules that apply, with your own lawyer.
Why buyers value it
A real estate CRM records how a lead was won or lost. Follow Up Boss ties each contact to a lead source, an assigned agent, a stage that moves over time, logged calls and texts, appointments and, for the ones that close, a deal with a stage, close date and price. Buyers building models of lead response, follow-up cadence and conversion want that chain from first inquiry to outcome, across many agents and market cycles.
Lost and cold leads matter as much as closed deals. They show which follow-up patterns did not convert, which is the half of the story that almost never appears in published data. Years of consistent stage and source data also let a buyer compare lead sources against actual closings.
What stays private
Buyers see de-identified operating records, not your leads. Under the license, the de-identification step before delivery removes or excludes:
- People: names, phone numbers, email addresses, mailing and property addresses, and relationship records such as spouses.
- Message content: the text of notes, texts and call notes, which often carry personal circumstances, financing details and family information. Counts, timing and outcomes can stay; the words are scrubbed or left out.
- Financial identifiers: pre-approval details, lender names tied to a person, and any account numbers typed into notes or custom fields.
- Agent data: agents' personal details and anything about their pay or splits.
- Third-party content: lead data and messages that came from lead providers or text-automation tools, which may carry their own terms. Check those agreements before listing them in scope.
Call recordings and email bodies are not part of what Follow Up Boss can export, so they are not in scope here.
Common questions
Sources
Vendor documentation, checked . Screens and plans change, so if a step looks different in your account, check with Follow Up Boss.
- Follow Up Boss Help: Export contacts to a spreadsheet (opens in a new tab)
- Follow Up Boss Help: Exporting reports to a spreadsheet (opens in a new tab)
- Follow Up Boss API: Authentication and authorization (opens in a new tab)
- Follow Up Boss API: Registration and identification (opens in a new tab)
- Follow Up Boss API: Pagination (opens in a new tab)
- Follow Up Boss API: Rate limiting (opens in a new tab)
- Follow Up Boss API: People (opens in a new tab)
- Follow Up Boss API: Calls (opens in a new tab)
- Follow Up Boss API: Text messages (opens in a new tab)
- Follow Up Boss API: Deals (opens in a new tab)
- Follow Up Boss API: Appointments (opens in a new tab)
- Follow Up Boss API: API Terms of Use (opens in a new tab)
- Follow Up Boss: Terms of Service (opens in a new tab)