Being a real estate agent often means leading a busy life – waking up early and juggling phone calls, meetings and presentations. It’s more often than not a handful of work for one person, but why should you overburden yourself, when you can outsource your work, especially the parts you really don't like, to your virtual assistant?
Who, you might ask? If you haven’t been living under a rock for a few years now, you probably noticed a rising demand for virtual assistants in all business fields. But what are they?
A virtual assistant is not a person assigned to bring you coffee in your office. It’s a remote worker who can provide you support with different management tasks you find you’re lacking time, will or skill to do yourself.
What Kind Of Work Can Your Real Estate Virtual Assistant Do?
Online Listing
According to 2017 Home Buyer and Seller Generational Trends report, the first step home buyers younger than 71 years old take is search for the estates online. Average home buyer’s age is 33, which is considered a millennial generation. Since this generation grew up using the internet, it’s no wonder they will choose internet over old fashioned newspaper ad search.
Nowadays online search allows buyers to manually choose what they look for in a property. This means you should make your online real estate listing update a priority, but this can be time consuming, as it requires estate details, description, photos or even virtual tour. Think about all the questions buyers ask. Does the master bedroom have an ocean view? Is it in a quiet neighborhood? Is it close to highway? Now imagine what part of a regular real estate agent’s workday would this take up, and it’s clear why you would outsource this job to someone else.
Social Media
Using social media is a trend in every business branch, and real estate is no exception. It’s the best tool for brand exposure and community engagement. Creating stories, writing blog posts, answering comments, you name it. But while everyone can post stuff on social media, it requires a certain skill and knowledge to transform content into sales. And that usually comes with practice, so it makes more sense to outsource this to someone experienced than to spend a vast amount of time learning how to build up online presence.
Data Entry
There is a lot of administration work that can’t be skipped. Spreadsheets have to be created, and important data to be entered. Names, numbers, emails… A database every business needs , and while it’s not a difficult task, it takes up a big amount of time, which you don’t have. It’s that boring part of the job people assign assistants for – so why wouldn’t you?
Calendar Management
Busy real estate agent workday usually means driving from one part of the town to another, showing estates and going to meetings. But last-minute calls or emails asking for rescheduling are nothing unusual.
Now, multitasking is a skill not everyone has, and in fact, you shouldn’t bother trying to achieve everything. You are not an octopus holding three phones, typing, calling and writing down appointments all at the same time, and you can’t teleport, so your calendar needs to be organized accordingly. And isn’t it much more professional to have an assistant setting up your appointments than to have to call back your client after you finish the current meeting?
There is nothing worse than forgetting an appointment, than maybe showing to an appointment your client forgot about. Have your virtual assistant contact clients to confirm dates to avoid unnecessary no-shows.
Verifying Legal Information
All information concerning property’s ownership has to be checked before you can sell it. That often means proofreading pages and pages, checking that all details match and that are correct, from names and dates to numbers. Sometimes it can take hours just going through this paperwork, and it’s impossible to coordinate with a busy agent’s house showings.
Choosing a VA
Virtual assistants are becoming more popular in real estate business, and the reason is obvious, you can’t do everything yourself. And the best part is – the world is your talent pool. You aren’t geographically limited, as your VA can be living on Antarctica for all it matters – as long as it has the skills you need to continue improving your business.
How To Make Sure You Are On The Same Page?
Be Clear With Instructions
While being a VA most of the time means doing everything your boss doesn’t want to deal with, you should be precise about the volume of work you assign them to. Create a list of tasks and prioritize them properly. But don’t expect them to be the jack of all trades. If you have a large amount of work needed to be done all with high priorities, consider hiring multiple VA and appoint them to different tasks.
Communicate Regularly
A virtual assistant is your right hand, so staying connected is the only way to function as a team. It’s important to have an open communication, on a daily basis. Be clear with your expectations, establish your priorities and deadlines. Give them a regular feedback, but also listen to their input.
Get personal with them. No, it doesn’t mean you have to be friends, but get to know the person behind the screen who organizes all your work. The least you can do is show you see them as your assistant and not your robot.
Monitor Their Activity
Since you are outsourcing all the boring but important data work to a virtual assistant, you might want to consider implementing some way of monitoring a computer to check on their progress. It might be smart to use a work tracker app, such as Workpuls, to keep track of their work activity. Why?
Workpuls is an employee work tracking software that shows you how much time your employees are spending doing certain tasks. The information gathered this way is useful in two ways:
You can see if a certain task is too much work and maybe requires more people assigned to it
You can check their competency to do a certain type of job
Since you are dealing with a remote workforce, work tracking software is the best way to check if the VA you hired is doing the job you pay them to do. By tracking employee computer activity you can check if they are slacking or actually working, especially with Workpuls’ feature that provides a periodic screenshot of their screen.
Another thing employee work tracker provides that makes managing virtual assistant(s) easy is payroll, as time tracking provides up-to-the-minute precision, and it allows a choice of pay periods.
In Conclusion
Every real estate agent has to deal with a lot of time consuming work concerning, but not limited to, administration work. And that is too big of a burden for a single person. But assigning a virtual assistant can be a great aid in finishing important tasks on time and avoiding burnout.
