You’ve got the hustle, the negotiation skills, and the drive to close deals–but what if we told you there’s a way to increase your productivity tenfold without cloning yourself or sacrificing your work-life balance? There is–and we’re here to tell you about the ins and outs of hiring a virtual assistant (VA).
These tech-savvy professionals can crunch numbers, perform market research, handle your calendar, schedule appointments, manage clients, and take care of the nitty-gritty tasks that eat up your time, leaving you free to work your magic.
What Is a Real Estate VA?
Real estate VAs are remote-working professionals who help real estate agents and brokers with administrative, marketing, and customer support services.
They assume time-consuming and repetitive tasks, such as general administration, bookkeeping, content and customer research, data entry, customer support, and project management work so you can focus on core activities like client interactions, networking, and closing deals.
What Does a Real Estate VA Do?
When you hire an assistant, some of the best tasks for VAs in real estate to do are:
Real Estate Research
Your clients will inevitably ask questions about the properties you’re selling, such as any homeowner association restrictions, neighborhood advantages, recent sales, etc. If you aren’t ready to answer them, you might lose the client—and the deal.
This is where a VA can come in handy. They can keep you up to speed by performing market research, finding property details your potential clients will be looking for, and performing listing research so you always know about the hottest deals in the target area.
Appointment Scheduling
As a realtor, you’re probably buried under appointments with clients that take you in all directions. Making sure you get to all of them should be priority number one. However, the chance of appointment conflicts is high if any meetings or showings run late.
A real estate VA can help you keep track of your appointments, manage conflicts, answer calls, and reply to emails to ensure you don’t miss an appointment or arrive late.
Administrative Tasks
From keeping up with client details and financial records to acquiring property information, administrative tasks are a hassle for anyone. However overwhelming they seem, you have to make sure they’re done correctly–that’s where a VA comes in.
By outsourcing your bookkeeping and data entry to a real estate VA, you will be able to dedicate more time to landing deals and making your goal.
Social Media Management
Social media is the place where business flows in and out nowadays, so having a social presence is essential to increasing brand awareness and landing clients. While it seems easy on the surface, creating posts and captions, getting the right shots, and replying to inquiries can eat up a surprisingly large amount of your time. The good news is you can offload all your social media marketing (SMM) tasks to a real estate VA.
They can help you plan social media campaigns, write catchy captions for your Instagram, whip up blog posts as needed, update your listings and database, and remain in touch with clients and partners.
Monthly Reports
Keeping track of all of your tasks is challenging when you’re pulling twelve-hour shifts and working eighty-hour weeks. Work demands often leave you with little time for sorting out monthly metrics, trying to understand which clients are moving forward, and knowing how much of your compensation is backlogged.
A VA takes the load off your shoulders by keeping track of everything you do behind the scenes. They’ll note down every deal, client, contract, commission percentage, dispute, and other details to ensure you know and reach your goals each month.
How Much Does a Real Estate VA Cost?
If you’re recruiting within the U.S., you’ll pay anywhere from $10 to $70 per hour for a real estate VA—or more. Generally, the sweet spot is between $15 and $35 per hour.
If you’re hiring from outside the U.S., a starting rate of $5 to $15 won’t be far off the mark. However, remember that rates can fluctuate depending on qualifications and experience, so if you want someone who is an SMM real estate expert, you’ll have to pay more.
Is Hiring a Full-Time Real Estate VA a Good Idea?
Climbing the ladder of success in real estate requires a lot of hard work, but you don’t have to do everything. VAs can make your life easier by taking over the grunt work and making sure you have the time to do your most important work: closing deals.
If you’re still on the fence about whether to hire a real estate VA, think about everything they can take off your plate. If that’s not convincing, consider that you can end up saving 78% on the company’s costs by using a VA from Guru!
