When you start out as a real estate agent, it may feel like you need to work long hours and dedicate yourself fully to your business just to be successful. Whereas this may pay off for a while, you’ll soon find that you’re sacrificing everything else — your family and social life, hobbies, even relaxation.
Worse, the likelihood is you’re not even spending the majority of your time on mundane tasks — not on work you enjoy. The solution is to find a virtual assistant for real estate agents.
Benefits of a Real Estate Virtual Assistant
With a real estate VA, you’ll have an experienced assistant to take care of all the aspects of your business you lack the time to manage yourself. This leads to several benefits.
Find More Qualified Leads
Generating leads is key for any real estate business, but it’s also one of your most time-consuming activities. A virtual assistant can fill your pipeline with qualified leads — all you need to do is convert them.
Focus on Work You Enjoy
There are some tasks that no real estate agent likes doing. This includes managing mountains of paperwork, following up with leads, updating listings. When you hand these off to a virtual assistant, you can focus your efforts on tending to clients and closing deals.
Improve Productivity
Spending time on monotonous tasks is more than just boring — it’s a waste of your valuable time. To see the greatest returns, you should be spending most of your workday on activities that require your expertise.
No Training Necessary
Unlike with a personal assistant, there is no need to train a virtual assistant — real estate VAs keep up with their own training. You’ll just need to provide some basic onboarding that covers the specifics of your business. In other words, you’ll be able to start working sooner and VA will cost less than hiring a personal assistant.
Save Money
Training is just one way you’ll save money. Contracting a VA is also cheaper than hiring a personal assistant because there’s no need to provide a physical working space nor pay the assistant a salary. Instead, you just pay for the hours you need.
Scale Your Business
Greater productivity from a virtual assistant means you’ll grow your business faster. To keep up with the greater demand for your services, it’s likely that you’ll need your VA to take on more hours. This is easy when you’ve contracted a virtual team member.
Plus, even if the original person you contracted is unable to provide you with more hours, you can always contract someone else. You may also consider outsourcing to a second VA if you need support with a specialist task.
What Do Real Estate Virtual Assistants Do?
What your VA will do for you depends entirely on what you need. Real estate virtual assistant duties tend to include the following.
Lead Generation and Screening
The best real estate VAs are experts in cold and warm calling and sending email blasts for lead generation. A tedious task, you often need to call or email the same leads multiple times before you receive a response. However, without this prospecting, your pipeline will dry up after you’ve finished closing your current deals.
Once your VA has finished the prospecting stage, he or she will screen leads to determine the best course of action to take next. This involves determining whether leads are ready to become clients or if they need more nurturing first. This is a crucial step, as it can help you avoid losing or ruining opportunities.
Filing Paperwork
A virtual assistant can manage all your paperwork, including contracts, business documents, and closing lists. By adding your papers to the cloud, your VA can create a system to organize everything. This will enable you to find the documents you need in an instant.
Calendar Management and Appointment Scheduling
Successful real estate agents have a full calendar at all times. This often means shuffling items around, while still making sure you finish the highest-priority tasks first. Your VA can take care of your calendar for you to ensure you’re always making the best use of your time.
A virtual assistant will also schedule appointments with clients and leads. Your VA will find a time that’s convenient for all parties and include a buffer to ensure you’re never rushing to arrive on time. The virtual assistant will also send confirmations and reminders to both you and the person you’re meeting.
Research
Research is an ongoing process for real estate agents. There’s always a huge amount of information to find out: the taxes for different areas, what your competitors are doing, market trends and lending rates, pricing points at particular locations, deed types of specific properties, and much more.
A virtual assistant can find out everything for you, analyze the information, and compile reports. Experienced real estate VAs even know what you’ll need without being asked.
Marketing
Your VA can take over your real estate marketing. This may start with the strategy itself — figuring out the best way to market your property and determining what kinds of campaigns are likely to have the highest ROI. Then, your VA can implement various types of marketing tactics, including blogging, videos, email newsletters, and digital ads. Finally, your virtual assistant can analyze the results and figure out how to improve future campaigns.
Social Media
A critical marketing activity for all real estate agents is social media. Your VA can manage your accounts for you — setting up new ones on platforms where you’re not yet active and optimizing current ones. Then, your VA will create a posting schedule with a balance of content types and use scheduling tools to automate posting.
A virtual assistant can even create social media posts for you, which may include repurposing content you already have. The VA will keep users engaged by responding to comments and direct messages.
Bookkeeping
When you start out in real estate, you may be able to manage your bookkeeping on your own. However, as your business grows, this is an activity that will take up significantly more of your time — and you may find it challenging if you lack a head for numbers. You’ll have an ever-growing list of expenses for supplies, fees to pay, licenses to renew, and marketing costs to manage.
Your VA will stop bookkeeping from being pushed to the bottom of your to-do list and ensure you’re always working with up-to-date, accurate financial information. You’ll never miss a deadline, face a penalty for paying late, or need to deal with the complications that arise when you forget to renew something important before the deadline.
Data Management
Maintaining an organized database of contacts is critical for real estate agents. You need to enter the correct information into your CRM and update details on a regular basis whenever you receive new information about a lead or need to reflect a change in funnel status. Your VA can do this, along with any other data entry tasks you have — such as compiling information about properties and creating spreadsheets.
Managing Listings
Your VA can find the best places to list properties and then write copy in accordance with the requirements of the platforms. A virtual assistant with photo-editing skills can also touch up your photos to improve their appearance. Whenever there is a change to a property, you can rely on your VA to update its listings.
Create Presentations
Beyond listing properties on third-party websites, it’s useful to promote them to potential buyers through attractive presentations. A real estate VA can create presentations for you, which you can use on your website and at virtual appointments.
In addition to presentations featuring properties, your VA can make slideshows about neighborhoods or containing other information prospective buyers may find interesting and useful. These are ideal to use as lead magnets.
Correspondence and Inbox Management
When you give your virtual assistant access to your email, your VA can manage all your correspondence for you. If you prefer, you can ask your VA to just draft the messages. This allows you to check emails before sending them. In addition, your virtual assistant can manage your inbox — assigning emails to folders and flagging those that require your attention.
Website Maintenance
A virtual assistant with knowledge of WordPress can keep your website up to date. This will help you avoid bugs that could slow down your site, make sure information is up to date, and protect you from hacks or data breaches. As a result, you’ll offer a great user experience and improve your SEO to see higher rankings in the search results.
Translation
If you’re looking to enter a new market with your real estate business, it may be beneficial to offer information in a second language. Your virtual assistant can translate the copy of your website, your email newsletters, blog posts, and other marketing materials, and your correspondence to help you attract a wider audience.
To receive a skilled and experienced real estate virtual assistant who is capable of carrying out all the above tasks and many more, choose MYVA360. We have an entire team of real estate VAs — and we’ll match you with the person who best meets your needs. Better yet, right now you can receive a 10-percent discount on our real estate virtual assistant services when you schedule a consultation.
