At its crux, the real estate industry is a personal one. Buying or selling a property is a decision that affects lives and as such, should be entered into with care and consideration. While digital tools such as Virtual Reality (VR) have changed the industry game a little and allowed real estate professionals to “show” a home to prospective buyers using nothing more than a headset (ideal for those looking for faraway properties that they can’t fly to on a whim), there are other tools designed to help the real estate professional himself.
One highlighted tool is the virtual assistant. While at first, this term might conjure up a robot from the Jetsons, keep reading. Today’s virtual assistant is someone on the other side of a keyboard working remotely, available to take on tasks that you may not have the time to devote toward fully. This affords busy, on-the-go real estate experts the opportunity to eliminate some of the time-consuming tasks that come across their desk so they’re freed up to meet with clients, iron out offers and handling the closing process.
If you’re wondering whether or not your office can benefit from these services, you can view here for more information. Today, let’s take a look at a few core tasks that a virtual assistant can help accomplish within the real estate realm.
1. Pre-Listing
The steps it takes to pre-list a property can be complicated. A top-quality virtual assistant can take care of a majority of the legwork for you so you can get the process started as quickly and seamlessly as possible. For instance, he or she can capture the names and contact information of qualified leads from your websites and send them to you, or add them into your comprehensive Contact Management System (CMS).
In addition, the virtual assistant can also help ensure that all your pre-listing documents are as complete and detailed as possible, adding in any images or other key facts you’d like to include. Once you have a potential client secured, the assistant can prepare and package up the pre-listing documentation for delivery. Once the package is confirmed to be successfully delivered, he or she can follow up with the client to field any inquiries your way or to confirm acceptance.
2. Marketing Activities
While you’re still in the marketing phase of your listing, your virtual assistant can, in tandem with your support, create PowerPoint presentations featuring your listing to deliver to potential buyers. You can also create presentations for sellers that detail all of your services as a real estate professional and why they should work with you.
3. Creating the Listing
After you’ve accepted a listing, your assistant can take care of many tasks related to creating and marketing it. From entering the new property to the MLS and your real estate website to creating virtual tours for prospective buyers, there are many steps to this process and most of them can be completed virtually.
You can also market your property to your email list, and your assistant can help by crafting the content for that message. He or she can also create flyer advertisements, then send fax, post, or send them as required.
4. Following up with sellers.
Throughout the selling journey, sellers want to know how their listing is performing. Keeping up with these metrics can be time-consuming, so it’s the perfect tasks for virtual assistant to perform. He or she can monitor REALTOR.com traffic, virtual tour visitors, website pings and even hotline calls to gauge interest. Then, he or she can report it to the sellers to keep them encouraged and give them a clearer picture of where their property stands.
While not every task will be appropriate for a virtual assistant to perform, the reality remains that having an extra set of hands and eyes can be an invaluable asset for a busy professional in any industry. This is especially true within the real estate sector, where time is money and closing a deal takes an entire team of dedicated and invested employees.
