Being in the real estate business is not easy. It comes with a lot of responsibilities, one being more important than the other. It is a constant dilemma on which ones to do first. If you are tired of juggling things around, then maybe you are in need of a real estate virtual assistant. Delegate your work with their help, but the question is, what are the things that you should hand down to them? Better yet, do they really make a huge difference in your overall productivity?
Related: Amazon Virtual Assistant: What Can They Do for You?
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What is A Real Estate Virtual Assistant?
You know what an assistant means, but what happens when you add the word “virtual”? You are given with an assistant that works remotely. Seeing them personally is not part of the job description and therefore, you can only delegate tasks that can be done through the internet.
It may sound limiting, but most work today revolves around the internet. While getting them to drive you around may not be a choice, they can still make a huge impact on your overall workload. One benefit with virtual assistants in general is that they are easier to manage. With that being said, you are not limited to hiring just one. Instead, you can have an entire fleet and delegate a huge lump of your workload.
What Does a Real Estate Virtual Assistant Do?
As the title suggests, you are just hiring an assistant. Someone who is just working for you to make your workload lighter. You are not getting someone who is in the same league as you as a real estate agent. This means that there are limitations to what you can make your assistant work on. Don’t make the mistake of relying crucial tasks to them. With that being said, here are what they can work on instead.
1. Research
When trying to make a sale, you are going to need all the information regarding a certain property. The commercial value of the land, probable depreciation over the years, and key characteristics of the neighborhood that will help you market it. The workload is something that can be done, but if you are selling tens and hundreds of properties, researching every single one can get nauseating.
What you can do is delegate this task to your real estate virtual assistants. Have them do all the reading and researching. Simply have them submit a summary of all the crucial information that you need to know. That alone takes a huge load off of your entire workload.
2. A Real Estate Virtual Assistant Does Data Entry
Keeping track of all your current, probable, and previous clients is tedious. You need to have a record of their names, addresses, emails, and other vital information. You can’t simply keep a mental image of every client you come across with. Losing track of one can result in a potential loss in sale
3. Cold Calling
Acquiring new clients involves cold calling. No matter how much of a veteran you are as a real estate agent, these calls could last from minutes to hours. The worst part is that despite the effort you put into it, there is no guarantee of acquiring a client. The task is tedious and lengthy with no assurance of success. To make things worse, you need to make a lot of cold calls to increase the chances of acquiring a client.
4. Online Marketing is Something A Real Estate Virtual Assistant is Good At
With everything already on the internet, you are going to want to make a strong presence on the online community. You do this by being aggressive in your online marketing, but that can get a little tedious. From social media marketing to content marketing on your website, online marketing involves a lot of approaches. It also means learning a lot of skills and managing a lot of things. Take this out of your workload and delegate it to your real estate virtual assistants.
5. Creating letters and emails
Keeping a strong relationship with your clients and prospects is what increases the chances of a sale. It can also result to repeat clients. Doing this involves a lot of messaging and emailing. You need to present new property, quotations, and attractive sales messages. When dealing with only one client, there is no problem. However, when you are keeping tens of hundreds of them happy, it is when things start to get too tedious.
Have your real estate virtual assistants do all the writing. All you need to do is review their work and give the confirmation to send out the email. A massive load off on all the things you need to do.
6. Management Tasks
The most crucial part in being a real estate agent is finding new prospects and acquiring clients. Those are what makes money. However, there are minor tasks that come along with them. Managing your calendar and schedules, setting appointments, managing paperwork, and book keeping are just some of the managements tasks that makes sure that you are being productive, efficient, and on schedule.
Benefits of a Real Estate Virtual Assistant
With so many responsibilities that can be delegated to a real estate virtual assistant, that should give you enough idea on the impact they can make in your life. However, to emphasize further, here are the changes when you hire one.
1. Increase Business Productivity
As they say, two heads are better than one. In this case, you can have more than one virtual assistant and increase the overall workload you can handle. The more people that are on board your team, the more tasks and initiatives that can be done within a certain time frame. What usually takes a week when personally done, can be accomplished within a day when delegated to a number of real estate virtual assistants.
2. Better Work-Life Balance
Remember those times when you have to take a call in the middle of the night or during your vacation? As a real estate agent, you know that clients ask questions any time of the day and you need to take those calls. What happens is the line is blurred between work and life. Delineate the two and keep it that way by making sure that only the most important tasks goes through you, the rest are handled by your virtual assistants.
3. A Real Estate Virtual Assistant Creates Savings
Unlike personal assistants, you don’t need to provide an office for your real estate virtual assistants. They are also low maintenance since they don’t need to commute to work, suit up, get ready, and everything else that an assistant would need to do. Generally, you have lesser operational costs and therefore, create savings.
Where Can I Find A Good Real Estate Virtual Assistant?
So, with all the good, where can you actually get one?
The great thing about virtual assistants is that they are more common than you would expect. So much that there is more than one way to find and hire one.
1. Outsourcing Agencies
The need for virtual assistants is so massive that some have made a business of providing the manpower. What you are looking at are outsourcing agencies and they can be the best thing for you.
You no longer have to do any part of the extensive hiring process when getting a virtual assistant here. It is the agency that does the screening and training. The only thing left for you to do is put the employee on board and you are good to go. No more credential check, background screening, and interview, unless you want to do that again.
Outsourcing agencies ensure that you are already getting what you need. Therefore, they significantly decrease the amount of effort you have to put into hiring one while guarantying that you get the best. Just remember to do your research and seek the services of reliable agencies.
Need a suggestion? One of the noteworthy virtual assistant agencies is Outsource Access. They provide a wide array of assistants fit for different industries. So, you can have them do real estate while working on financial statements as well. If that doesn’t suit your taste, a quick Google search can easily land you on other competing agencies.
2. Get Your Real Estate Virtual Assistant From Freelance Websites
Sometimes, being able to do the hiring process gives you peace of mind. You hire someone whom you trust and believe that you can rely on. When you are more into that, then you are going to find outsourcing agencies more of a burden than a help. Fortunately, there is another great choice for hiring virtual assistants aside from them.
Freelance websites are a great place to find employees of different skills, and virtual assistants are in no shortage. Places like Upwork and Fiverr make it easy for you to find the people you need. They don’t just pool applicants in one place but also filter out skills and experience. So, you don’t have to spend all the time manually going through each application.
3. Social Media
The least ideal, yet still a probable choice, for hiring a virtual assistant is social media. If you have a social media page for your business, put up a job ad. When you have established high authority, only people who are confident with their skills end up submitting an application.
Job ads in social media can spread like wildfire. There are groups and communities that are specifically catered for the real estate profession. When your ad reaches those places, and it will, it is a pool of skilled individuals waiting to be tapped.
However, there will be bad fruits mixed here and there. While it may be the more difficult and less advisable choice, you can still end up with a great, if not the best, real estate virtual assistant.
How to Hire Virtual Assistant For Cold Calling in Real Estate
In the world of real estate, cold calling plays a huge role in acquiring clients. It’s because there are a lot of people who are in between decisions. They don’t know if they have enough money, what their choices are, and so on. With all their questions, they don’t know who to ask. That’s where cold calling comes in the picture. It makes sure that people who have questions and are in the market for real estate get the answers they need and be persuaded into making a positive decision.
The quality of your cold calls can dictate the success or failure of your business. When it is this important, the virtual assistant doing it should know what they are doing. So, when you are hiring, do these in order to only get the right people for the job.
1. Evaluate Their Communication Skills
You want your cold calling virtual assistant to have good communications skills. It is the most basic foundation of a great caller. If they don’t know how to talk and stutters, they are going to lose the interest of a potential client.
The better your virtual assistant communicates, the better they are going to give answers. Straightforward and clear conversations is what potential clients want. They don’t want to keep on asking and clarifying because your cold caller is finding it difficult to level with them.
So, how do you test out if a virtual assistant is a good talker?
The very first step would be to check their credentials. Have they had any prior experience with talking to customers or clients? If they have been in customer support or teaching, you know that they can be well-articulated with getting their point across.
However, what’s good on paper doesn’t necessarily completely reflect reality. That’s where the second and final step kicks in, talk to them. When doing your interview, don’t concentrate on their answers alone, but as well as how fluent they articulate it. Do they keep on stuttering? How about their choice of words?
How a person talks during an interview is a reflection on how they will perform under pressure. It is a skill that is practiced and learned. So, when an applicant is not performing according to your standards, it is likely they are not going to be a good cold caller and you should proceed with the next.
2. Do a Mock Cold Call
A cold call is not all about knowing how to talk, but how to study as well. Your cold calling virtual assistants are only as good as what they know. If they don’t study the specifics and details of the properties you are selling, they are going to be equally ineffective with those who lack communication skills.
Assuming you are convinced with how your applicant talks, the next step should be making them study necessary materials and conducting a mock cold call. It is in this stage you will learn if they are capable of understanding specific details and recalling them when needed.
3. Keep Close Attention on Their Personality
Do you think that a clear and concise conversation is enough to keep a potential client on the phone? Apparently, the answer to that would be a hard and solid no.
Another crucial concept of communicating is the enthusiasm of the person you are talking to. The livelier your cold caller is, the more the other person on the line will stay on the phone. Therefore, personality is a crucial aspect of being a cold caller.
How would your cold caller react to an arrogant client? Would they respond the same or keep the conversation levelled until they have gotten the trust of the client? When under stress, do they answer strongly or manage to keep the conversation alive and enthusiastic?
While it is hard to determine the personality of an individual at first glance, you can get a hint from people with a temper. There is no foolproof way to see the true colors of your applicants, but you can try to fish out their reaction to different situations. During an interview, try to make things hard. Throw in some difficult to answer questions and recreate the attitude of an arrogant client.
4. Ask For References and Call Them
If you want to get a clearer picture about your applicant, who would be better to ask than their prior superiors. So, ask for references and make some calls. It either further reinforces an applicant’s credibility or reveals details you might not want in your cold caller. Either way, reference calling is one final way to further ensure you are only getting the best and most capable.
So, Who are Hiring Real Estate Virtual Assistants?
With so many great benefits with real estate virtual assistants, you would ask, who are already making good use of them?
1. Property Centre
Based in Australia, Property Centre is a small real estate business run by its owner Peter Forbes. He was doing almost everything to keep the business afloat, even the smallest of administrative tasks. It got too hectic that he was concentrating more on operating the business instead of acquiring clients.
Upon hiring a real estate virtual assistant, he was able to take some load off his schedule. While he puts all his attention on producing sales and enticing clients, his assistant is behind the scenes doing all the administrative work that comes along with it.
2. Mi Property Group
The Mi Property Group is no stranger to administrative work especially that they are handling a handful of clients. Prior to their shift to virtual assistants, they have been running the traditional office setup. Now, they are working under the assistance of a single real estate virtual assistant who does market research, data entry, and social media marketing.
3. Bellarine Property
Run by its independent director, Levi Turner, Bellarine Property has quite a long list of clients. Along with it, also came a mound of administrative and paperwork. Fortunately, the workload is distributed among their teams of virtual assistants. The efficiency of their operations has grown so much that he reports an average of 25% more appraisal listings and sales.
4. Jason Gard Real Estate
Located in Australia, Jason Gard runs his own real estate business. While he might be an independent contractor, clients manage to find him and seek his services. He doesn’t have any problem with closing a deal, it is what comes after that he hates. So, while his operations may be small, he decides to get himself a real estate virtual assistant to lighten the workload without having to compromise the financials of his business.
While there is an extensive list of realtors making use of virtual assistants, that’s only a small percentage. Overall, not a lot have made the shift just yet. It can be attributed to virtual assistants being relatively new, especially in the field of real estate.
In the United States, there are over 1.4 million active realtors. Compare that to the active virtual assistants and you are looking at less than 10% that are being assisted by virtual assistants. Therefore, a huge potential of growth and savings are being lost ever year.
Are they Worth It?
What real estate virtual assistants do is make sure that you only have to work on the most important tasks. You no longer need to spend time on minor responsibilities, allowing you to concentrate on what really brings in the money. They don’t just make things easier, but allows you to be more productive without risking your personal life. So, are they worth it? The answer is a no brainer: without a doubt!
If you think that a real estate virtual assistant is something that you need. Look no further, what you need is the assistance of the best marketing company. Contact us today to get a quotation for what you need and receive a free strategy consultation.
