Real Estate Virtual Assistants: Why Do You Need Them?

Real estate is surging with growing demand for industrial and commercial infrastructure. Studies reveal that by 2030, the real estate industry will reach 14.6 billion U.S. dollars.

Image Source: Statista

In such a cutthroat competition, realtors struggle to mark their presence. The major concern for real estate owners is to fit all the crucial tasks into their day. 

If you own a real estate company, you would probably recognize these time sinks.

• Responding to emails, texts, and phone calls
• Processing real estate documents, agreements, and lease records
• Coordinating appointments, showings, open houses, and meetings
• Creating and distributing flyers, newsletters, listings, and more
• Creating budgets for monthly, quarterly, and annual operations
• Developing marketing plans for listings 
• Updating client databases 
• Researching listings to develop comparative market analysis (CMA) reports 
• Updating websites and social media profiles

What Is a Real Estate Virtual Assistant?

A real estate virtual assistant (VA) employs their knowledge to manage daily jobs that are crucial to your organization but don’t require direct supervision. They are specialized personnel who take care of business tasks, including cold calling, lead generation, financial tracking, website building, marketing, and database maintenance.

They serve as virtual allies by handling all the administrative work. Thus by hiring a real estate virtual assistant, you can free up your time to concentrate on business-strategy tasks that drive growth and boost income.

What Does a Real Estate Virtual Assistant Do?

Are you, like most real estate agents, thinking about how to leverage the skills of a virtual assistant? 

Let us delve deeper into the tasks you can outsource to a virtual real estate assistant.

Administrative Task Assistance

As a busy real estate entrepreneur, you might be inundated with an unending list of administrative tasks. While you don’t have the time to separate the wheat from the chaff, a real estate virtual assistant can help you. Virtual assistants handle back-office tasks, phone calls, data entry, scheduling, and office management.

• Email Management: Sort or filter emails, respond to questions from prospects, send follow-up emails, and keep the inbox clean.

• Research: Real estate assistant keeps up with real estate trends. They can conduct initial research to prepare dossiers and marketing collateral for your properties.

• Data Entry: Enters and updates real estate information – email address, phone number, mailing address, and more.

• Calendar Management: Calendar management is vital to ensure things are on track. A real estate assistant tracks tasks, meetings, and other commitments for you.

• CRM: Every realtor needs to track leads and manage sales pipelines. A virtual assistant ensures prospects stay engaged and sales opportunities don’t fall through the cracks.

• Transaction Management: Real estate agents must coordinate their transactions and deals. A qualified virtual assistant can handle all the minute details of real estate transactions.

Marketing Assistance

A virtual assistant can aid real estate businesses in getting the most relevant leads. They bear the burden of implementing marketing insights and taking care of email and social media marketing campaigns, greatly expanding your reach.

• Website Maintenance: A virtual assistant ensures uniformity and coordination throughout your website to present a unified front that your customers can trust.

• Social Media Marketing: Real estate assistants update your social media pages to keep your target customers informed and interested.
• Digital Marketing: Virtual assistant plans successful digital marketing strategies. They update your social media pages and create flyers, videos, etc. 

Listings Management

A qualified virtual real estate assistant can handle all your real estate listing needs, allowing you to focus on core competencies.

• Update Listings: People can only learn about a property’s availability through listings. A virtual assistant creates and maintains your listing for prospective clients.

• Organize Listings: A real estate virtual assistant organizes listings while you persuade the clients to buy the property.

Customer Support

Virtual assistants are skilled communicators who can converse with clients, respond to their questions, and keep them informed of new postings.

Handling Customer Queries: Handling customer queries can be a daunting task. A real estate assistant addresses customer concerns and replies to emails while you tackle big deals.

Marketing Collaterals: It can be challenging to design a new presentation for each pitch you make to a potential client. A real estate virtual assistant creates presentations and designs brochures for your open house.

Why Is a Real Estate Virtual Assistant Necessary to Promote Business Growth?

According to Technavio’s industry analysis, the size of the worldwide virtual assistant market will increase by USD 4.12 billion, at a CAGR of 11.79%, during the forecasted period.

Image Source: PR Newswire

Your daily grunt work might wear you out both psychologically and physically. Hiring a VA could change everything. Here are a few reasons why:

Cost Efficient

As an entrepreneur, you always look for ways to save money. However, cutting costs could potentially result in hiring individuals who are not competent. Hiring a skilled virtual assistant is cost-efficient. You will only have to cover the cost of your VA’s work hours; you are not responsible for paying for insurance, paid time off, or holiday bonuses. It means you can save money to further invest in expanding your business.

Access to Global Talent

When you hire an in-house employee, you are limited to hiring candidates from your geographical region. In such situations, you sometimes end up hiring underqualified candidates.

Utilizing virtual assistants opens up a world of possibilities. You can hire people from around the world depending on your requirements.

You are not bound to work in the same office premises when outsourcing virtual real estate. As a result, business owners can collaborate and hire people globally without spending excessive money.

Flexibility

The real estate industry demands the knack for swift closures. You will often face unforeseen circumstances. Moreover, in-house employees have a set schedule. They might not always be able to meet your needs. A virtual assistant, on the other hand, works around your schedule to cater to your business requirements.

No Training Headaches

Hiring an in-house employee involves training and onboarding. After the training, it would take weeks for them to get started. With virtual assistants, you don’t have to worry about training and onboarding. A qualified outsourcing company like Office Beacon screens, vets, and trains virtual assistants who can start working immediately.

How Do Real Estate Virtual Assistants Drive Business Growth?

Real estate assistants are very resourceful, dependable, and well-organized. They can assist you in effectively managing your workload and reclaiming your time for activities that promote business growth.

1. Enhanced Efficiency: Real estate business owners have a lot on their plate. And it becomes hard to handle all the tasks alone. To this end, a virtual assistant comes to the rescue by taking a load off your shoulders. As a VA handles other aspects of your business, you’ll be able to meet more clients, close more sales, and make more money. In this way, the company will prosper.  

2. Better Productivity: Productivity is an essential driver for business growth. As a realtor, you deal with too many tasks that hamper productivity and leave you exhausted. A VA can assist you by taking on some of the chores you don’t have time to complete. You’ll have more energy to concentrate on your company’s operations and other responsibilities. A VA can also assist you with time management so that you work more efficiently rather than harder. 

3. New Ideas: The real estate industry is ever-changing. To outshine, a realtor should bring a fresh perspective to the business. A virtual assistant is well-versed in real estate trends and offers a fresh understanding of your business. They bring new ideas to the table so you can make the necessary changes to move your business forward.

Myths Related to Real Estate Virtual Assistants 

There are some common misconceptions you will come across when planning to hire a real estate virtual assistant. 

❌ Not Trustworthy: Not correct. VAs from Office Beacon are reliable and exhibit the utmost professionalism with clients.

❌ Difficult to Work Virtually: Not anymore. Office Beacon offers software for seamless communication between the VA and the client.

❌ VAs are Expensive: Not necessarily. Virtual assistants do not demand employee benefits and only charge for the amount of work they do.

❌ VAs are Not Productive: Virtual assistants are highly skilled and guarantee to do the assignment within the allotted time. 

Challenges Real Estate Companies Face

Overwhelmed with administrative and clerical responsibilities, real estate businesses face many challenges. Here are the top challenges a real estate agent faces every day.

1. Customer Service: Reaching out to potential customers and addressing their concerns is time-consuming and tiring. Moreover, today’s digital-savvy customers demand a high sense of attention and detail. With many tasks, real estate owners struggle with customer service and initial sales.

2. Scheduling: Getting to every appointment right is an eternal struggle for a realtor. For many real estate owners, this leads to bad scheduling. Due to poor calendar management, real estate owners run the risk of missing out on crucial business opportunities. 

3. Never-Ending Administrative Tasks: The administrative work in the real estate sector frequently piles up. Further, real estate companies fail to carry out administrative responsibilities impeding productivity and hampering workflow.

The numerous time-consuming tasks involved in real estate could harm your revenue and growth opportunities. Hiring a virtual assistant for real estate can allow you to focus on the most significant areas of your business while handling all of these additional obligations.

What are the Best Practices for Hiring a Real Estate Virtual Assistant?

Before hiring a real estate virtual assistant, set clear goals – your expectations from the virtual assistant.

Once you set your expectations right, it will become easy for you to review deliverables and make sure every task you hand your VA is executed with precision on point.

The following are the best practices that businesses need to follow while hiring a real estate virtual assistant:

Identify: First and foremost, identify the areas of your business that need assistance. Then set how much time you need these tasks finished.

Set: Set the goals and the tasks for the real estate VA clear right from the beginning. From this, build a thorough job description highlighting the scope of the work.

Communicate: Now, communicate your requirements, work ethic, and schedule that works for you. Specify the deadline for the VA to complete the task.

Wait: Once you give inputs and set goals, let the VAs do the rest. Clear the doubts the VAs have and provide feedback. And wait and watch the VAs perform.

You can utilize a virtual staffing provider like Office Beacon to get quality real estate virtual assistants at a fraction of the costs.

At Office Beacon:

• You get handpicked, vetted, and trained staff in all tools and software used by businesses across the globe.
• Virtual assistants with multilingual capabilities give you an edge over your global competitors.
• Virtual assistants operate across various time zones (EST to PST) to suit your business needs.
• Complete redundancy with fully operational delivery centers across 4 locations.
• Backup resources at no additional cost.
• Complementary software to eliminate costs incurred on third-party software.

Hiring a Real Estate Virtual Assistant

It is essential to thoroughly weigh your options before deciding whether or not to engage a virtual assistant for your real estate business. Before assigning duties to a remote worker, look at the benefits and costs. 

Cost-Benefit 

The first step is to decide if the virtual assistant is worth the financial investment. For this, weigh the potential cost of a virtual assistant against the potential benefits.

There is a wide price range for real estate virtual assistant services.

Image Source: Payscale

A virtual real estate assistant’s costs depend on who, what, and where you are looking. As you can see from the above image, the average hourly pay for a real estate assistant is $15.58.

Before deciding on the virtual assistant, weigh the expense against your company’s needs and the return on investment.

Location

The costs of a virtual assistant may vary from location to location. However, there is a common misconception that overseas virtual assistants are expensive.

Image Source: Best of Budgets

According to a study, the Philippines has the lowest average virtual assistant salary of $400 per month, and Australia has the highest average virtual staff salary of $5,600 per month.

Overseas outsourcing is affordable. There are talented VAs all over the globe who are skilled in various aspects of the real estate business. Some virtual assistants are comfortable delivering results across time zones.

There is also a place for local talent, especially in the real estate industry. 

For instance, if you need to outsource a lot of client-facing work, it might be beneficial to choose a US-based or even locally-based provider who is more familiar with the specifics of your market. When you require full-time, client-facing assistance or plan to meet with this person in person, doing so usually makes the most sense. 

Experience & Expertise

While choosing a virtual assistant, look for the right experience and expertise. Choose a real-estate-specific expert who has a demonstrated history of performance.

Check whether the VA is capable of dealing with your list of outcomes and expectations.

With over two decades of experience, Office Beacon houses vetted virtual assistants with expertise in the real estate industry.

Office Beacon’s real estate virtual assistants are adept at performing the following tasks:

• Market research
• Data collection (listing information) 
• Open house management
• Conducting market analysis 
• Preparation of property cards 
• Scheduling and confirmation of appointments 
• Follow-up calls to buyers 
• Transaction coordination 
• Bookkeeping 
• Data entry for real estate 
• Correspondence management 
• Call screening and answering services

The virtual assistants at Office Beacon can manage different administrative tasks, marketing responsibilities, and even real estate transaction coordinator responsibilities.

Closing Points

Being a real estate agent is quite hard. You have to deal with properties, clientele, and prospecting. Remember that you don’t have to do anything alone if it starts to feel overwhelming. Real estate virtual assistants handle time-consuming, repetitive duties crucial to your business. Hire a capable virtual assistant for real estate to put the emphasis back on building your company.

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