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What Are the Top 5 Problems Real Estate Companies Have?
There are few things more frustrating than knowing exactly what it is that you need to get done to achieve the next level in your business and not being able to find an obvious way to execute it. We all know more or less exactly what we need to do in order to make more money as a real estate agent: you have to know the territory, you have to fill out the loans and contracts, you have to get more potential homebuyers in the door, and you have to manage to fit all this into a 24-hour day.
With some good help, you could easily increase your ROI and spend more time closing sales and less time doing paperwork. So, let’s explore how real estate virtual assistants can help you get to that future.
1. Getting People in the Door
Your day-to-day when you’re at your best should be closing deals, showing houses, and making sure that you’re ready to face whatever unexpected challenges the day throws your way. But for that to happen, you have to make sure that you’re getting people in every day and that those people are actually serious about buying a house. It doesn’t do you any good to waste your day talking to people who are just looking when there’s someone around the corner ready and excited to buy what you have.
2. Customer Service and Initial Sales
When it comes to reaching out to customers and addressing their concerns and questions, the well can be truly endless. One particularly needy client or one incommunicado client can eat up hours of your day and cause stress that takes years off your life. By having your virtual assistant fielding your calls, you can save yourself those headaches and those countless hours while also giving your customer the sense that they are always important and that you or someone in your office is always available.
3. Scheduling
Making certain that you get to every single appointment and finding time for every single appointment is an eternal struggle for a realtor. In addition to being able to help you out with all of your marketing and communication, a virtual assistant can help you get to where you need to be when you need to be, managing your calendar to ensure that you’re never over-booked or under-booked.
4. The Eternal Mountain of Administration
If you’re thinking of getting virtual help, administrative duties are probably the first priorities on your mind. The hundreds of little details build up quickly in any business and can clutter your desk and your schedule.
5. Becoming Fully Independent
Perhaps less a problem, and more of an aspiration, many realtors eventually want to open their own business and be fully independent if they are not already at this place in their careers. However, it can be extremely difficult getting to this place with all of the extra day-to-day tasks and costs of running a real estate business. With more traditional modes of business, it can feel like being fully independent is always just out of reach.
To hire a full-time employee, you have to take care of so many additional costs and have on hand a whole additional person’s salary every month. In short, to break out independently, you need to already have the kind of cash you’d make from breaking out independently. It’s a catch-22.
How Can Virtual Assistants Help Solve These Problems?
In real estate, there are so many time-consuming tasks that can eat into your bottom line and your potential to grow. Hiring a real estate virtual assistant can help you deal with all of these extra tasks, so you can focus on the more important parts of your business.
Virtual assistants represent a middle ground between bringing on someone full-time locally at a higher cost and attempting to go it alone and shouldering every bit of labor that would take. Virtual assistants are readily scalable to the amount of work you need and the cost you can afford. They are also less expensive than traditional labor, as you don’t have to pay all the expenses associated with hiring a full-time employee yourself.
What Are Some of the Tasks That Real Estate Virtual Assistants Can Perform?
Real estate virtual assistants can help a business in so many ways. While each business and situation is unique, a real estate virtual assistant can perform any of the following tasks and more.
Marketing Research and Execution
One of the most essential virtual assistant real estate services is marketing. By completing market research, your virtual assistant will help you to get the most relevant leads for your buck. VAs can also take the brunt of following up on these insights by taking over the task of converting them into email and social media marketing campaigns, dramatically increasing your reach.
Graphic Design
A lot of real estate agents also have their virtual assistants take over the management of the graphic design for their materials, which allows you to have timely in-house documents and ads drafted up rapidly by someone who’s integrated with your on-the-ground projects. An assistant with graphic design experience can help give your social media, website, and other documents a polished look.
Social Media and Website Coordination
We’ve all seen those poor, neglected websites that are so out of date that it makes you question whether the business is serious about their work. We’ve also all likely seen those situations where something is shared to Facebook but not Twitter, or the Instagram or YouTube channel but nothing else. A virtual assistant can help to maintain uniformity and coordination across your social media platforms and your website to present a unified front that your customers can trust.
Cold and Warm Calling
A huge amount of time goes into responding to warm leads and cold calling new potential buyers. If you agree on a script and tone with your virtual assistant, that entire set of tasks can vanish overnight for you, changing your practice from hunting down ghosts to only having your time filled by pre-qualified candidates who are ready to move forward with showings and negotiations.
Follow-Ups: One of the Most Powerful Tools
Many business owners find that they have trouble getting around to every follow-up with every client, despite how valuable that call really is. A virtual assistant can take over that responsibility for you, helping you finalize details on an interaction that really takes it to a proper close.
Keeping Timelines Organized
A good VA will ensure that all of your deals are on track from intake to closing, keeping clearly visible calendar dates not just for your meetings and appointments but also the paperwork and contracts that need to be signed and dated at each point in the process. There is no reason to leave these things to chance, and there is nothing worse than missing out on a big deal because of a missed deadline or detail somewhere along the way.
Travel Planning
A virtual assistant can also make sure that travel to and from properties with cushion time is factored into your scheduled appointments. A good VA won’t just plop an appointment across town onto your lap and think that they’re doing a good job. They’ll factor in drive time, lunch, and any refueling or packing that needs to happen to get you from point A to point B. No more speeding to make certain that you get to appointments on time — you can rest easy knowing that someone is looking out for you.
Loan Paperwork
Realtors and clients alike have to very carefully fill out the paperwork to make sure that funding is available in a timely way for closing. Virtual assistants fill this role, clearing out one of the most critical tasks from your schedule and letting you move on to the next client as your VA finishes up the paperwork.
Bookkeeping
Nothing is worse than coming in at tax time to confront your own disarray that has accumulated over the year. A virtual assistant can actively take your accounting documents and receipts and get them organized before you ship them off to the accountant, turning your tax filings into a ship-and-send affair, as opposed to an extended battle between you, a calculator, and a huge raft of receipts.
Filing and Data Entry
Making sure that all of the documents for each of your clients are neatly buttoned up and available is a huge weight off of your shoulders. Nobody wants to have to alphabetize each client, make sure that each attachment finds its way into the appropriate folders, and track things down when they aren’t there. A virtual assistant will not only do this for you but can enter data off of your personal notes and other documents into spreadsheets and programs so that you have access to all your information at the press of a button.
What Are the Benefits of Using a Real Estate Virtual Assistant?
When you hire a virtual assistant for your real estate business, you’re sure to see many benefits. No matter what type or size of real estate business you have, a virtual assistant can free up your schedule. That freedom means you can focus on your clients and the parts of your business that you want to grow.
Having a virtual assistant takes some of the workload off your plate. Less work means that your business can be more successful, you can find more clients more easily, provide better customer service, and you’ll be able to scale your business more quickly and easily, serving more clients and bringing in more profits. And even better, with a virtual assistant handling the day-to-day tasks for you, you can enjoy a better work-life balance. No more feeling overworked or cutting into your family or personal time with the minutiae of running your business.
Are There Any Downsides to Using Virtual Assistants in Your Real Estate Business?
As with any service, you’re going to get what you pay for. Far too many business owners of all kinds expect far too much of their virtual assistants on a low budget. If a business expects cheap help, it will likely get lower-quality work. A cheap virtual assistant for realtors can be more of a headache than a help, so finding the right balance between cost and competence can be a real challenge if you don’t know where to look. Virtual Latinos has found a way to provide high-competence virtual assistants with real estate experience for a price that keeps both parties happy and profitable.
Hire From Virtual Latinos for Your Real Estate Company
Virtual Latinos lets you hire VAs from Latin America, where the cost of living is much lower, so it doesn’t cost as much to keep the people helping you out healthy, whole, and enthusiastically ready to assist with your business. Latin America shares deep cultural understanding and geographic adjacency with the rest of the North American real estate market.
Our virtual assistants also have direct experience working directly with people in the U.S. and Canada and are in the same time zones. This means that, unlike other virtual assistant services that might not be on your work schedule, our agents know how to help you and are awake at the same hours as your clientele.
So, if you’re ready to take the next step towards elevating your real estate business to the next level, reach out to us to schedule a call, and let’s see how we can get you a virtual assistant for real estate success!
