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CMA Report Virtual Assistant
Real Estate Virtual Assistants for Creating Comparative Market Analysis Reports (CMAs)
Goal:
A CMA Virtual Assistant is specially trained & focused on creating Comparative Market Analysis Reports (CMAs).
In other words, they’re trained to follow your systems and processes to look up Comps & build clean, professional Reports based on the research.
Therefore, the most important goal of a CMA Assistant is simply to automate and outsource the process of creating Comparative Market Analysis Reports, so you never again have to lift a finger to do it yourself manually.
How It Works:
First & foremost, as always, we recommend you ensure that the CMA Virtual Assistant is always working Process-Based, Not People-Based.
This means their work should always be following a detailed, step-by-step Standard Operating Procedure (SOP).
One piece of good news is that the CMA Report Workflow is so simple & repetitive, a single SOP should easily be able to cover all the details, including:
- looking up recent sales,
- looking up similar properties currently for sale,
- gathering the info for the CMA Report itself, and
- inputting the info into your CMA Report Template or software.
In your SOP, you can even provide extra guidance, either in the form of screenshots, or a linked training video, where you give the Virtual Assistant special insights on what to look for when it comes to Comps in your local market.
Your CMA VA should easily learn to judge a property by not only its audited or county assessor tax reports, but also by any pictures they can find, either from past Listing photos or digging deeper on Google Street View, all to get the best idea of how to judge & select the best Comps.
Using the SOP, and any additional training you provide, your Virtual Assistant can learn to discern if a property needs to be adjusted for certain features that make it more or less valuable than your target Subject Property.
The end goal is to have a Virtual Assistant who knows exactly how to create Competitive Market Analysis Reports just as you like them.
Your VA will prepare Comps following your existing procedures, gathering compelling & accurate information, then formatting it into your CMA Report Template to ensure you’re essentially getting the same quality work you would do yourself (for a fraction of the cost, and none of the time & energy you’d normally have to spend).
Pros:
The greatest value of having a Virtual Assistant for your CMA Reports is that now you can build as many Reports as you need on total autopilot, without hardly lifting a finger.
It’s such a simple, repetitive process that once you’ve delegated it off your plate, you can completely set it and forget it.
You can build a simple hand-off / trigger process for your Virtual Assistant, right into the SOP, so that you can easily “order” a CMA just by dropping the VA the address, and everything else can happen on their end while you sit back & relax.
In a best case scenario, if you have a part-time VA running CMA Reports consistently, you can even get the turnaround time down to a matter of hours!
Therefore, just some of the benefits you’ll see with a properly implemented CMA Virtual Assistant include:
- More time to do tasks that only you could do.
- More time to do tasks that make you more money.
- Less overhead across the board.
- Fewer hours your in-house Teams are pulled off of their main responsibilities.
Cons:
The biggest downside of hiring a Virtual Assistant for CMA Reports is the initial training process.
Building the SOP should be easy… but helping your Virtual Assistant understand the finer nuances of Comps in your local market will most likely take some back & forth to hone.
That’s because every real estate professional in every local market has a slightly unique approach to researching & organizing Comparables.
Plus, you also probably have your own particular approach to building the final CMA Report (perhaps even leveraging a proprietary cloud-based software to do so).
Therefore, there is also likely to be a bit of back-and-forth to find the perfect design & styling of your final Reports. Keep in mind, your CMA Virtual Assistant is likely just an Overseas Admin VA, not necessarily a design expert!
The good news is: once that setup curve is completed, the ongoing management & maintenance of a CMA Report VA is simple.
However, since this type of work is usually a very light workload, you will also probably have to periodically replace the Virtual Assistant who opts for a new full-time role elsewhere…
… so keep this turnover in mind when you’re training the current VA & record as much of the training process as possible so you don’t have to re-do it over & over every time you hire someone new.
Work Estimate:
While an exact Work Estimate for your CMA Report Virtual Assistant can vary, depending on the complexity of your research & report-building requirements…
… you can typically ballpark about 1 CMA Report for every 1 to 3 Work Hours.
By far the biggest variable will be the amount of Comps you want the Virtual Assistant to research.
Finding each Comp then gathering the necessary details can take about 5 – 15 minutes, so gathering 4 Comps could take up to an hour!
This type of work does benefit from economies of scale, so the more CMA Reports you do at a time, or per day, the faster the Virtual Assistant will be able to complete each one.
This means, ultimately, you can use an Overseas Virtual Assistant to build a CMA Report for you, with a total hard cost of about <$10 – $20.
By providing sufficient training, and working off a systematic, step-by-step Standard Operating Procedure, your Overseas VA can build CMA Reports as well as a local Agent — or even you yourself — could (at a tiny fraction of the cost)!