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Real Estate Brokerage Virtual Personal Assistant
Generalist VAs to Help You Personally, or Handle Menial Tasks for Your Agents
Goal:
By adding Virtual Personal Assistant(s) to your Real Estate Brokerage, you’ll accomplish two valuable goals:
#1. You’ll free more of your own time, to focus on building & coaching your Team, and generally running your business, PLUS…
#2. You’ll be able to improve everyone on your Team’s performance, by training them to delegate low-level menial Tasks (so they can focus on higher-value activities).
This will help you build a more efficient, profitable Real Estate Business, while simultaneously freeing you to work less or pursue larger goals.
How It Works:
A Real Estate Brokerage Virtual Personal Assistant combination of generalist & specialist, rolled into one.
They are a generalist, in the sense that their role will likely involve working on several separate Workflows in your Brokerage.
They are a specialist, in the sense that they have almost definitely worked with other Brokerages in the past, and are familiar with many of the menial, repetitive Tasks that might be expected of a Personal Assistant in that environment.
By taking a process-based, not people-based approach (with all VA Workflows following detailed step-by-step Standard Operating Procedures), you can systematically build a modular, scalable Back-Office Team with the right mix of Overseas & US-based Virtual Personal Assistants.
Once trained on your documented procedures, your Virtual Assistant should be able to dependably handle a wide variety of basic day-to-day Brokerage Workflowā¦ to the extent you can even offer it as an add-on service for your Agents (which many Brokers charge extra for, covering your hard costs without anything out of pocket beyond the initial set up).
While the Real Estate Broker Virtual Assistant task list can include an extremely wide variety of activities, a few of the most popular include things like:
- New Agent Recruiting & Onboarding
- CRM Admin Tasks & Management
- Transaction Management & Contract-to-Close Tasks
- Social Media Posting & Engagement
- Outbound Cold Call Telemarketing
- Web Research & Data Entry
As with most Virtual Assistant Tasks, your Virtual Personal Assistant will be best utilized to help you:
- Free more time,
- Save more money, and
- Grow your Sales Pipeline.
You’ll get the best result by using Overseas VAs to handle simple, menial, and repetitive Workflows.
Think of it this way:
Your local US-based, entry-level Assistant is probably earning $16 – $18+ per hour.
You want your Agents shooting for $100k per year GCI (at least!)… which amounts to about $50 per hour.
That means every outsourced hour of work is saving up to $40+ (and at least $8 – $10).
If you can outsource 20 Work Hours Per Week to an Overseas Virtual Personal Assistant, that’s a savings of anywhere from $8,000 to $40,000+ per year (!!!).
Therefore, the best way to think of a Virtual Personal Assistant for your Brokerage is to focus on utilizing their time to plug the holes in your existing processes where your Agentsā time is being under-utilized (and over-paid).
Pros:
As discussed, there are several main value propositions you can achieve by properly implementing a Virtual Personal Assistant for your Brokerage, primarily:
#1. Free more of your own time, so you can work ON your business instead of IN your business.
#2. Free more of your Agents’ time, so they can earn more money & grow your Brokerage’s revenue.
#3. Save money by reducing the costly waste of high-paid local Team Members spending time on low-level menial Tasks (that a Virtual Assistant could handle just as well, if not better).
All-in-all, this is essentially the definition of why you would use Virtual Assistants in the first place. This type of work is one of the most obviously use-cases that nearly guarantees success in the form of a positive ROI.
Cons:
There are two huge downsides with setting up & staffing this type of generalist Personal Assistant function for your Brokerage:
#1. Set Up Is Intensive. Building out documented, systematized processes will take time, energy, and brainpower… before your Virtual Assistant can ever hope to be successful.
#2. It’s a Difficult Role to Fill. Since you’re looking for someone who can wear a variety of hats (from SOP-based, step-by-step menial Admin Tasks, to potentially interacting with Clients, Vendors, and Agents)… PLUS someone who you’ll be communicating with personally on a near-daily basis… you need to find a Virtual Assistant who is the right fit.
Even taking a process-based approach, this is one of the roles where personality matters.
You need to take your time & hire the right person, and not give up when you end up having to fire & replace several Virtual Personal Assistants before you finally find the one(s) who are a long-term fit.
Work Estimate:
The Work Estimate for a Virtual Personal Assistant at your Brokerage can vary widely.
You can take an approach similar to that of an individual Agent when hiring a Virtual Personal Assistant, and just have someone on-call for as-needed work.
Or, your better option, if feasible, is to hire a dedicated, full-time Virtual Personal Assistant.
That’s because with this type of role, it’s best if it’s the Assistant’s whole livelihood. You are much better off if they aren’t juggling your business with someone else’s (maybe someone in an entirely different niche).
Therefore, the best way to look at the Work Estimate is as a full-time role… with the challenge then being how to put together a proper full-time workload.
The easiest way to accomplish a full-time workload is to have the Virtual Assistant picking up one or two Workflows at a time, each taking 2 – 4 Work Hours Per Day.
It’ll probably take about 1 – 3 weeks to add each new Workflow to their plate, from SOP Development, to Training, to initial monitoring & coaching.
That means, within 4 – 8 weeks, you’ll be able to build out a daily workload that keeps your Virtual Personal Assistant maxed out & busy 40+ Work Hours Per Week.
This approach will bring a new & valuable (but still affordable) member to your Team, and significantly free up you & your Agents’ time to focus on higher-level, revenue generating activities.