Outsource School for Real Estate Businesses, Realtors and Property Managers. We suggest you get back to school before you start your Real Estate Outsourcing journey. In this article, you will see exactly why.
Investing in real estate is one of the best ways to generate passive income. It is a promising business industry that attracts many entrepreneurs to start their real estate ventures. However, managing properties and the operations of the business is not as easy as one may think. It requires a lot of focus and time for one person to do all the admin, operations, sales, and marketing tasks. This is why in recent years, more and more real estate entrepreneurs have started outsourcing and leveraging virtual assistants to scale their business. One person can’t do it all, so delegating is definitely the smart move. This article will serve as your guide in learning everything you need to know about outsourcing tasks to a real estate virtual assistant so you are equipped before you start looking for your first hire.
What Does a Real Estate Virtual Assistant Do?
A real estate virtual assistant (VA) is someone who remotely provides the needed support for your business. They work offsite and deliver quality service for your real estate business. You can hire them full-time, part-time, project-based, or on an hourly basis. The span of tasks that a real estate virtual assistant can do is massive. It can range from time-consuming administrative things to developing marketing strategies to managing operations. Commonly, general real estate virtual assistants handle all the short tasks for the business, but as an employer, you are free to tweak their roles according to what your company needs. They relieve the hassles of cold calling, following up an appointment, setting a meeting, data entry, doing paperwork, organizing calendars, responding to emails, customer support, and a lot more. In short, a real estate VA saves you the time to focus on the strategic part of the business instead of spending all day doing tedious admin work.
Benefits of Outsourcing Tasks to a Real Estate VA
Giving back your time is only one of the many benefits of outsourcing tasks to a real estate VA. They have so much more to offer. Let us walk you through the immense benefits you can get from outsourcing and a real estate virtual assistant.
They take tasks off your plate
With an extra hand available to help you with office tasks, you’ll have more free time to rest and strategize for your business. It will lessen the stress brought by the ton of work, thus making you a healthier and improved entrepreneur.
They increase overall efficiency
Outsourcing fosters productivity within the company. With a competent real estate virtual assistant, you can increase your business performance and achieve objectives effortlessly.
They are cost-effective
Hiring a virtual assistant is much cheaper compared to a traditional assistant. With a conventional employee, you must pay the necessary expenses such as power consumption, office rent, insurances, benefits, and more. It might affect your budget badly, especially if you are starting in the industry.
They boost productivity
Many say that virtual assistants can do almost everything, and 99% of the time, this is true. They can manage your operations for you quickly, increasing the productivity of your business.
They save you so much time
You can outsource tasks that you hate doing or aren’t good at, saving you time to do what you love and create business strategies. Allot more time to listing and selling properties rather than spending it all on data entry.
Tasks You Can Outsource to a Real Estate Virtual Assistant
Now that you know that you can outsource most of the tedious tasks to a real estate virtual assistant, here are more specific things that they can do and will save you so much time as an entrepreneur.
Administrative Tasks
Administrative tasks keep the operations running and maintain the business information solid. Outsource all of your admin tasks from data entry, database management, answering phone calls, and scheduling meetings to your real estate VA.
Bookkeeping
Keeping track of your books is essential for easy and organized real estate accounting. You can easily outsource this task to your VA and ensure that your book entries are all updated.
Content Creation
Creating content is a very time-consuming task but a very effective marketing strategy and improves SEO. Have someone write blog entries and letters for you so you can catch up with trends and reach prospects.
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Prospecting
You can delegate cold calling, email marketing, email collecting, and other tasks to generate leads.
Calendar Management
Managing your schedule becomes hard once you assume the role of an entrepreneur or CEO. have your real estate virtual assistant set and update your schedule and appointments with clients to ensure that you don’t forget anything.
What You Need to Do Before You Hire a Real Estate VA
The process of hiring a real estate virtual assistant can be tedious at first. But once you get the ball rolling, everything will be easier moving forward. To guide you in hiring your first VA, here are steps that you can follow that would guarantee you an effective hiring process.
1. List down tasks you need help on
Start with listing all the tasks in your business operations and the time it takes to finish them. It would be best if you saw what is necessary for you to do and what is not. From your list, narrow it down to the things you seriously need help with and those that take most of your time. Finalize your list of tasks and ensure that your potential VA can do it for you by including it in the job description. This will help you find a suitable VA for your support needs.
2. Create Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for those tasks
Make a systematic SOP for each of the tasks on your list. SOPs will help you effectively manage your remote team or your real estate virtual assistants at ease and prevent nuisances in operations. With a well-defined standard operating procedure, you wouldn’t have to train and guide your VAs closely, saving you time and energy.Your SOPs must be process-oriented and comprehensible for your VAs to understand your operations quickly. Set your SOPs first before hiring your VA.
3. Determine your budget
Create a budget plan for the hiring and onboarding process. Setting your budget early on is essential to effective hiring and negotiating salaries with your potential virtual assistant. Ensure that you don’t go over the budget when presenting salary offers and benefits. A predetermined budget will help you find a real estate VA suited for your business and will not negatively impact your finances.
4. Make a job post
After getting the primary tasks done, you can now proceed to make a job post. Create an easily understandable job post. Include a short description of your company, complete details of the role, necessary requirements, and rates. The key to a great job post is formulating it in line with your target audience. If you want to attract a specific crowd of quality virtual assistants, you have to write an excellent job post and publish it on an active work marketplace such as Fiverr, Free up, Upwork, and Facebook.
5. Interview, hire, and onboard
Lastly, after receiving the initial applications of potential VAs, you can now filter them and proceed to the interview. Ask questions relevant to the role, experiences, and the company. You can also negotiate salaries and the setup during the interview. After the interview, make an offer and hire the real estate virtual assistants that you think best fit the role and your company culture. Do not ever skip the onboarding process, a common mistake of many entrepreneurs. This stage is your last chance to look for red flags, such as avoiding the onboarding process and refusing to be held accountable for their shortcomings.
Hire and Manage Real Estate VAs the Right Way
Outsourcing can be daunting if you’re new to it, mainly because you are dealing with virtual assistants that can be from the other side of the world. However, as mentioned earlier, outsourcing is very much worth it as it makes your life easier. Thankfully, there are also a lot of ways to manage the risks involved. You can avoid a lot of hiring mistakes by taking excellent outsourcing courses online. Outsource School, for example, offers a wide range of quality outsourcing courses. You will find courses and playbooks here from finding to firing a VA – and everything in between. Making bad hires will cost you a lot of time and money. Invest in yourself and in your business by making sure that you are equipped with the right knowledge and tools. When you master outsourcing, you can intelligently leverage virtual assistants to scale your real estate business.
