What Can Virtual Assistants Do For Real Estate?

It’s said that until you hire an assistant, you are your own assistant. Think of all the tasks you’d love to delegate to someone else so you could focus on the big picture. Then think of having an actual person in your office doing those tasks for you. Does your office have the space? Do you really have enough tasks to fill that person’s time for 40 hours a week, or 20 hours a week – and if not, are you willing to pay them to surf the internet or play Candy Crush during their down time? Hiring a virtual assistant solves both problems.

Considering the amount of repetitive, easy tasks involved in the real estate business, plus variable inflow and hours, it’s a wonder why more real estate agents don’t hire virtual assistants. They can become an indispensable part of your real estate business by focusing on the tasks below, freeing your time to focus on making big deals happen:

Administrative work

A virtual assistant, or VA, can do all the mundane scheduling and communication tasks associated with finding new clients, showing them homes, and closing sales. Just getting your VA to keep your calendar up to date, fax and retrieve forms, set up and confirm appointments, and answering phone and email communications can save you hours every day.

Marketing Support

When administrative processes have been streamlined, you can get your VA to start supporting your marketing efforts. Virtual assistants are great for updating social media, blogs, and websites. Of course, this depends on how much control you want to have over content – but if you really want to leverage their time while also controlling the message, at the very least a VA can take already perfected content and schedule its publication. Updating listings, creating brochures or videos, or even website design are also great tasks to leave to your VA.

Sales

How much of your sales process requires in-person contact on your part, and how much is email and phone based? The latter part is time you could be focusing on closing sales in-person and expanding your business in other ways. Getting a VA to follow up with email leads from online listings and providing phone support is a major win. If you trust your VA and feel comfortable working with him or her, you can even start them doing telemarketing work for you. They handle the cold calls – and you get only the hot leads.

Post-Sale Support

Finally, a virtual assistant can even help you with post-sale tasks. They can follow up with the buyer to make sure they have everything they need in order to enter into possession of the home, like keys, manuals, warranties, etc. They can even send buyers housewarming gifts – all you have to do is delegate the preparation tasks to them, then follow up with a simple phone call.

Save Time with Freelance Staffing Solutions

Some people are still daunted by hiring a virtual assistant because of the difficulty of finding the right candidate and the possibility that they’ll come to rely upon just one person  who may unexpectedly quit. Using a virtual staffing solutions solves this problem nicely – first, because your tasks are often split among teams, with the staffing firm taking responsibility for filling gaps in availability; second, because these firm will often use time tracking tools to make sure their employees are accurately billing for their time. Start delegating some of the tasks above with a staffing company and let us know how it changes your real estate business in the comments!