If you are like most real estate agents who do well, you are busy. When you were doing 1-2 deals a month, everything went smoothly, but now that you’re doing a lot more, the work-life balance is getting difficult, and things are getting a bit more complicated at the office.
There’s no better time to think about hiring a great real estate virtual assistant.
What is a Real Estate Virtual Assistant?
A real estate virtual assistant (VA) is an office worker who helps you run your business. A real estate VA can help with a wide range of business tasks in person or from a distance. The right VA can handle a wide range of tasks, such as lead generation and database management, as well as finance and marketing. Essentially, they are your “right-hand man”.
What Can a Real Estate VA Do?
The key to success in any role is to make sure the tasks and outcomes you’re looking for are laid out to help set up your assistant and yourself for success.
Real estate virtual assistants can help with:
- Marketing – You know that marketing is important for your business, but it can take a lot of time. A virtual assistant can handle many of the marketing tasks on your plate, and even do some of the more heavy-duty tasks, so you can spend more time on the things that only you can do for your business
- Operations – If balancing your time between projects, deadlines, and schedules isn’t your working well for you, having a virtual assistant to help with day-to-day real estate operations can be a big help. A real estate VA can help with many tasks that help keep your office running smoothly, creating less stress for you
- Sales – Just because these assistants are virtual, doesn’t mean they can’t be an asset to your sales. You will be surprised by how many sales tasks a virtual assistant can help you with, such as researching buyer and seller leads, cold calling, lead follow-ups, setting appointments, and more!
- Administrative tasks – There are also traditional virtual assistant tasks, like the types of responsibilities you would assign to a secretary or personal assistant
Common Real Estate Virtual Assistant Tasks
Anything that doesn’t need your special skills, personal connections, or direct supervision.
It can be things like:
- Getting appointments with buyers and sellers and making sure they happen
- Listings’ marketing and running
- Keeping up with your social media accounts
- Getting back to people via email and live chat
- Getting leads and marketing via email
- All of these are places where a real estate agent’s virtual assistant can do well and become a powerful asset
Even more so for the digital tasks that are such a big part of buying and selling today.
How to Prepare for a Real Estate Virtual Assistant
Remember that you need to get your office operations in order before you start looking for and interviewing VAs. This will help you set clear goals from the start.
From there, it will be easy for you to look over objectives and make sure that every task you give your VA is done to your expectations.
Start by setting up your business system and process, and then figure out where the main roadblocks are and the exact tasks and results that would help get rid of those obstacles and bring in more deals. From there, you can write a job description with clear goals and an idea of what success looks like in the role of your real estate virtual assistant.
The Benefits of Hiring a Real Estate VA
There are so many benefits of having a virtual assistant for your business. Below are some of the many benefits of having a real estate virtual assistant.
- Experts in the industry, which means they can help your business stand out from the rest
- Allows you to have extra time on your hands, which means your productivity increases
- Increased efficiency due to the ability to have more time for your more pressing tasks
- Saves costs because you don’t need to hire a full-time assistant with overhead
- No benefits, health insurance, or payroll costs
- Gives you and your business flexibility because you have more free time and your assistant can answer calls, emails, and texts when you are not available
- Weekend and evening assistance
- Improves your quality of work
- Reduce your stress!
How to Hire a Real Estate Virtual Assistant
To figure out how to hire a virtual assistant, you should first know what kinds of tasks and projects you need help with. You might find it helpful to make a list of the tasks you would like to outsource and then divide them by how difficult they may be, what systems they need, and what skills they need. This can help you decide if you can hire an assistant with little experience or if you need a specialist.
The Importance of Real Estate Virtual Assistants
If a real estate entrepreneur wants to grow their business, they might hire a real estate virtual assistant as part of their plan. By giving tasks and projects to other people, such as administrative and specialized tasks, a business owner can spend more time and energy on activities that bring in money.
Virtual assistant services are a must-try if you want to reach your long-term sales goals. Real estate agents can learn from the early adopters of the practice and outsource their back-office work to make the most of their time with their clients for showings, open houses, and more!