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Real Estate Graphic Design
Specialist Virtual Assistants to Design Custom Graphics & Real Estate Marketing Materials
Goal:
Every real estate business needs:
- graphics,
- logos,
- product logos,
- icons for your website,
- infographics that you can share to your drip email and to your social media,
- backdrops for videos, &
- really any type of images that you need for your real estate business.
The goal of using a Virtual Assistant for your Real Estate Graphic Design is to make it as easy as sending a simple description to your Graphic Designer, then getting those graphics custom designed to your specs, turned around in only a day or two for a really reasonable cost.
How It Works:
When it comes to Graphic Design Virtual Assistants, you’ll need to first consider where your business is in its overall content & Branding:
- Do you already have clear Brand Guidelines, with logos, color schemes, typography rules, and more?
- Or do you need to more clearly establish & codify your Branding to ensure uniformity across all channels?
When working with freelance Graphic Designers or 3rd party agencies, you’ll want to be sure you arrive with as clear a vision as possible.
Ideally, that means establishing Brand Guidelines before you approach 3rd party Designers.
From there, it’s a matter of getting to know your design objectives, and finding a clear way to communicate these with your Designer(s).
This might mean creating videos, collecting samples you like, or even going through a multi-step iterative process, to eventually reach a satisfactory final product.
Once you have a good workflow for creating new designs & submitting feedback, the key will be planning your next several rounds of work in advance:
Do you need an infographic next month? A new Social Media Banner? Youtube thumbnails?
Start building & adhering to a Content Creation Calendar for your Design Team, and you’ll have a consistent, smooth-running back-office building the never-ending stream of Graphic Designs required of Real Estate Businesses.
Pros:
The biggest pro of using a Graphic Designer Virtual Assistant is that you’ll be finding someone who can (hopefully) grow & evolve with your organization.
If you don’t need enough graphics to hire a full-time, in-house Graphic Designer, then hiring a Virtual Assistant who is freelancing or with an Agency can provide you with expert Graphic Designers ready on-demand with fast turnaround times (for a much lower monthly commitment).
When you find the right Graphic Designer(s) for your Team, you’ll eventually see a design workflow that allows your entire business to present a more professional, up-to-date public image across every channel (all thanks to a unified Brand Design strategy).
Cons:
The biggest challenge we see with people in real estate businesses working on Graphic Design projects is knowing exactly what you want.
Figuring out what graphics you’d need and for what purpose can be tricky.
Sometimes it’s worth bringing on a Marketing Consultant or Coach who can help narrow down your goals of what type of graphics you need and how to describe them.
But generally, the most difficult part of Graphic Design is figuring out what graphics you want in the first place and what roughly they should look like. A great way to shortcut this difficulty is to have examples on hand of similar graphic projects that you already know and like.
Work Estimate:
Most Graphic Designer Virtual Assistants will be working hourly, just like any other type of Virtual Assistant. You’ll probably be paying by the hour, or on project-based rates that are more-or-less related to the amount of Work Hours required.
Graphic Designers from the USA and Overseas have much more similar pricing than other types of Virtual Assistants, so you can expect you’ll be paying low- to mid-US-based rates for anyone worth hiring (regardless of location).
That means approximately $15 – $30+ per hour for a decent Designer (and we’ve paid much more & been happy on certain niche & high-end design requirements).
With those figures & concepts in mind, here are some work estimates specifically for the number of hours for a type of project:
- to create a logo, depending on complexity, you can be looking at anywhere from two to 10 hours;
- to create an icon, each icon should take less than an hour;
- for an infographic, depending on complexity, you can expect anywhere from 10 to 20 work hours to get something that you’d actually feel comfortable sharing;
- for direct mail pieces that already have the written content layout & graphic embellishments, these can take as little as only one to two hours and as much as 10 hours.