Hiring a Real Estate Virtual Assistant

In your real estate business, you’ve likely noticed that there are a few things you can do that you’re especially good at. You may also notice that some of your most important activities (such as showings) yield you the most results when it comes to generating leads and generating interest. If you’re stuck at the office handling marketing materials, research, and more—it leaves you less time.

And what if you notice that some of the essential work—like research on the MLS—is limited by the hours you have in a day? The only way to expand is to add someone to your team. A real estate virtual assistant that can be hired with reasonable hourly rates is a great way to dip your toe in the waters of expanding your team without making the full-time commitment of a full employee.

Here’s what your life in the real estate industry might look like with a virtual assistant:

• More productive capacity. Hard as you work, you have the same limits that we all do: you only have twenty-four hours in a day. Adding a real estate assistant to your team means you can have two people at the same time, allowing you to squeeze more value out of each and every day.
• Outsourcing the activities you don’t like doing. Let’s say you were always a fan of serving your clients, but never the process of marketing and prospecting. Hiring a real estate assistant means you can have someone to tackle the activities you never liked doing in the first place. That ensures that not only do activities like prospecting and marketing get done, but they can be done effectively without you having to lift a finger.‍
• Automate your daily life. Let’s say you’ve previously had to spend up to an hour a day just handling your own social media management. Or what about bookkeeping? There may be some things in your daily life that you always wanted to automate, but never fully committed to it because you were worried you would have to train someone with minimal experience. A real estate assistant can help change that.

Still on the bubble about a virtual assistant for your own real estate business? Even if you believe there are talented and skilled assistants out there, it can be hard to see how making a hire like this can impact your bottom line. Let’s look at some of the statistics and the benefits that demonstrate why an assistant can help you:

Productivity: Getting Better at the Administrative Tasks

Admit it: the administrative tasks aren’t always your favorite parts of the day. If you’re in real estate, you likely got into it because of your passion for this business, your people skills, or some combination of the two. The administrative tasks that mark the day-to-day operation of a real estate business, however, are a different animal.

The good news is that hiring a real estate assistant can mean outsourcing the work not only to someone who’s equally as efficient as you—which would be nice—but may even be more efficient with these administrative tasks. As SmallBizTrends has noted, “remote workers are more productive because they have more control of their time and spend less time traveling to the office.”

Whatever efficiency your virtual assistant can bring to the table becomes efficiency within your own real estate enterprise. If they’re more productive than you at data entry, then it becomes less profitable for you to engage in your own data entry. If they’re more efficient at researching your market, then at a certain point it doesn’t make sense for you to handle your own MLS research, either. 

Cost: The Surprising News About Virtual Assistants

Ask anyone who’s never hired a virtual assistant before about the cost of adding someone and they’ll likely have some skepticism. It’s only a natural part of growing. After all, someone who’s worked in real estate might have some trepidation outsourcing any of their usual activities to someone else. They’re not used to it. If you’ve been good at, say, email marketing, why should you trust that a real estate assistant is going to be just as good?

Another major issue for many of these people: cost. They don’t trust that a virtual assistant is going to be worth the hourly rate it costs to keep them working. Even a virtual assistant only charging part-time costs can be a challenge for someone who’s never grown their enterprise before.

But you’d be surprised at what the numbers suggest. Cost is not only less of a factor for hiring virtual assistants, but it’s a major advantage when compared to what it takes to hire someone full-time. BestOfBudgets notes that a virtual assistant can save up to 78% on operating costs throughout the year. With a skilled virtual assistant, the question isn’t whether you can afford one—it’s often whether you can afford to avoid hiring one.