Outsourcing tasks to a virtual assistant has been a reliable strategy to increase productivity for businesses for decades.
Different industries have discovered that virtual assistants can help them to be more efficient. Outsourcing lead generation and customer service is a common practice in the real estate industry.
How Can A Virtual Assistant Service Help You?
A VA can help your business to grow and take some of the pressure off by taking care of some of the work.
SBOs can also benefit from hiring a virtual assistant (VA), such as no employee-related expenses, no separate office space, no downtime concerns, etc. You would simply pay the VAs for the services they performed according to the terms of their contract.
A professional and reliable virtual assistant (VA) can be just as important to a team as a permanent employee, and should be treated as such, according to business experts.
If you have trust and dependability in your virtual assistant, they will become an important part of your organization, and you will realize that you have found a valuable asset.
If you’re constantly overwhelmed with work, you might experience burnout. This is especially common for small businesses with 1-5 employees.
Hiring a virtual assistant (VA) or contacting a virtual assistant company to help find the right VA for you are both smart decisions.
How To Decide What You Should Outsource To A VA
As a small business owner, you will be responsible for hundreds of tasks every day. You will be responsible for a lot of different tasks on a daily basis, ranging from bookkeeping to social media management.
Chris Ducker, a virtual CEO and publisher of ChrisDucker.com, recommends that every entrepreneur create a “3 Lists to Freedom” for immense entrepreneurial success.
Here are the three lists that’ll help you delegate your time more effectively and boost productivity:
- Things you hate doing.
- Things you can’t do yourself.
- Things you shouldn’t be doing.
Make a list of the things you don’t like doing in your business on a daily basis. This could be anything from bookkeeping to administrative tasks.
The company’s daily elements that you have no experience in, such as social media marketing and graphic design.
Ducker says that the third placement will change your business in a big way and advises you to ask yourself what you shouldn’t be doing. He reminds you that you’re not a superhero and can’t do everything.
Ducker lays out a road map for those who want to hire a virtual assistant (or “VA”).
What Does a Real Estate Virtual Assistant Do?
While many real estate professionals who are familiar with the internet know what a Virtual Assistant is or what they do, I know a lot of people who are just starting to use the internet. This section is for them.
Virtual assistants are a big help to businesses in many different industries by taking on a lot of the work that is needed to keep a business running. You can have someone manage your social media, do your accounting, answer emails, and many more.
In addition, virtual assistants usually live in different parts of the world. You can have your employees work on tasks while you sleep, turning your business into a 24/7 operation! You can have workers that work on your time zone and are available at any time of the day.
There are many different skills that virtual assistants can have that make them good at working in specific industries. There are VAs that specialize in dropshipping, online marketing, law firms, and many other areas. This leads us to the question:
As a real estate professional, you can have a real estate virtual assistant help you with a variety of tasks, such as keeping track of your listings, setting up appointments, and handling customer inquiries.
Tasks That a Real Estate VA Can Do
If you are thinking of starting a real estate business, it is important to find someone who can be trusted to take care of the paperwork, deal with customers, and keep track of appointments. A virtual assistant can do many of the same tasks as a physical assistant, and likely even more. Examples of tasks a virtual assistant might do include:
1. Research
Research is a critical part of the real estate industry and should be conducted regularly. It is, however, rather time-consuming. Even though you might be getting ready for a meeting with a client, you still have to go through and analyze a lot of data, such as migration rates, lending rates, developments, and other real estate basics.
It can be helpful to have a virtual assistant to read through tedious information and provide you with a report of the important research points.
These research points may include:
- Finding the ownership of a property and deed type
- Checking out establishments within a property’s vicinity
- Looking for properties with good pricing and upside potential
2. Data Entry
It would be very time-consuming and frustrating to have to type or update all the names, addresses, emails, status reports, and other vital information about your clients by hand. Although this task may not seem like much, it can actually take up a lot of your time. If you have a VA, you can have them do your tedious work for you and have it all organized in a spreadsheet.
3. Basic Bookkeeping
It is important to keep track of income and expenses when running a business. It will be difficult to improve your business financially if you cannot accurately evaluate your current performance.
While some real estate agents prefer to do their own accounting, a virtual assistant can handle the basic bookkeeping tasks, freeing up the agent’s time. If you have a VA, they can help you keep track of your finances and have instant access to important information.
4. Spreadsheet Creation and Management
There is a strong connection between spreadsheets and real estate. Who can you blame? There is no easier way to organize numbers and data than using spreadsheets. However, like most tasks a real estate agent has to do, spreadsheets can be time consuming. Almost all virtual assistants have the ability to create and manage spreadsheets.
5. Cold Calling
In order to cold call effectively, one must be skilled in speaking and have the ability to keep the listener engaged. However, the act of cold calling itself is quite boring. Despite its reputation, using fear as a marketing tactic to help gain more prospective clients is still a common practice in the real estate industry. If you would like to stop receiving phone calls from your VA, you can provide them with a list of alternate numbers to call.
6. Managing and Organizing Agreements or Contracts
The most important thing in the real estate industry, whether it’s physical or digital contracts, is making or breaking a sale. A client may lose their copy and ask you for another. This means that it is important to have a virtual assistant to help you so that you don’t lose important contracts or forget where you saved them.
7. Setting and Organizing Appointments
Setting your appointments yourself is not difficult. However, it can get confusing when you have to think about other equally important things. Additionally, you never know when a client will request a meeting, so having a schedule for appointments is also important.
An easy task for a virtual assistant would be to set and organize appointments. If you use a scheduling tool, you will not have to worry about forgetting or being confused about upcoming meetings. Additionally, if you are punctual for your meetings, you may receive more referrals.
8. Calendar Management
In addition to client appointments, you will still have other things that you need to squeeze in to your schedule. There are other things in your life that you have to take care of. Do you think you’ll be able to make your dentist appointment at nine? Do you have to go to a friend’s house for a going away party? The real estate industry is already fast-paced, so adding more to your plate can be tough.
This means that having a virtual assistant to help manage your calendar will not only make sure you are punctual with your clients, but also help you have time for other aspects of your life.
9. Creating Letters or Emails
It can take up to an hour to write a well-crafted email, depending on the topic. You may need to attach some documents to your email before you can send it to your client. To do this, you’ll need to find the files you want to attach.
One of the top qualities that a VA must have is the ability to speak and write English well. This means it should be easy to find someone who can write an email that is interesting and grammatically correct, and that has a lot of detail. As long as you provide them with clear instructions on what should be included in the email, you’ll be good to go!
10. Online Marketing Tasks
This is the process of using digital channels to promote or market products and services to customers. Online marketing for a real estate business can help keep up with the digital age by promoting or marketing products and services to customers online. If you’ve heard of it, or even have it running, you know it requires a lot of time and effort. A task that a VA can handle is finding contact information.
Your virtual assistant can help you manage your social media and website content, write and/or upload blogs and articles, manage newsletters, manage online ads, and anything else you might need help with. Moving these jobs from your plate can help your business run more smoothly since managing an online marketing campaign is not a simple task. Therefore, you can either teach your virtual assistant online marketing skills or hire someone who is already familiar with the topic.
Other online marketing tasks may include:
- Promotions
- Analytics
- Content marketing
- Email marketing
- Public relations
11. Website Management
Although it may be time-consuming, managing a website is one of the most important things that a real estate agent or company must do. If your website is not properly managed, it could be vulnerable to being hacked, bugged, or broken. If you have a virtual assistant with some web development experience, you can delegate this technical task and focus on other things.
If you aren’t using a website to promote your real estate business, it’s time to start. If you’re not interested in creating your own real estate website, you can always hire someone to do it for you. The help of a digital marketing agency can improve your online presence and attract more customers.
12. Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Building good customer relationships is key to advancing your real estate business. Remembering a birthday or congratulating a client on their anniversary can increase your chance of referral.
With so many clients to keep track of, it can be hard to remember everything about them. Although it may seem like having a virtual assistant would be an extra expense, it can actually help you improve client relations. Utilizing your CRM tool can help keep your clients happy, or remind you of important events so you can greet them properly when you meet them.
13. Prospecting
Searching for potential customers or clients in every possible place is called prospecting. This could include buyers or sellers. This can take a huge amount of time, although it is quite essential to boost your sales. If you have a virtual assistant, you can focus on meeting clients and closing deals, while they take care of other tasks.
14. Proofreading
Have you ever read a grammatically incorrect email? Doesn’t it bother you and make you not want to read any more? Some of your clients wouldn’t mind if you had some grammar mistakes on your website or in your emails. If you want to sound professional when writing, then perfect grammar is essential.
Do not be too hard on yourself if you make a few mistakes, even expert writers do. You can rely on your Virtual Assistant to help you by giving an outsider’s perspective and proofreading your emails before you send it to a client, or posting content on your website.
15. Translation
In the United States, there are approximately 577 million Spanish speakers. While Australia’s population is steadily growing, the number of immigrants from China, Singapore, and Hong Kong is increasing. With a virtual translator, you can communicate with a wider range of clients, and have a better chance of getting more clients. This will also allow you to take advantage of the opportunity to have immigrants coming to your area looking for a place to live.
