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Real Estate Brokerage Software Virtual Assistants
Overseas VAs to Help Manage Repetitive, Menial Admin Tasks in Your Tech Stack
Goal:
The goal of your Real Estate Brokerage Software Virtual Assistant is to outsource repetitive Admin Tasks (so you’re not wasting you & your local Team’s time on them).
Getting these types of Workflows delegated to Overseas Virtual Assistants is one of the most consistently positive-ROI ways to use VAs, since these Tasks can be systematically documented via step-by-step Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) to the extent that an Overseas VA can do about the same quality work as a local Assistant (for a fraction of the cost).
This will also free you & your Agents to focus on tasks worthy of their licensure and pay grade: Marketing, Sales, and Networking!
How It Works:
Every Real Estate Brokerage is running on unique set of multiple software tools (your Tech Stack).
Many of these technologies require repetitive, low-level, menial Admin Tasks to be constantly kept up-to-date & functioning to their full capacity.
That’s where Overseas Real Estate Virtual Assistants come into the picture.
While it’s always important with these types of Admin Tasks to think Process-Based, Not People-Based (meaning that each Task and Workflow should always follow a detailed, step-by-step Standard Operating Procedure), the types of repetitive Workflows occurring inside your Tech Stack should be very easy to document & outsource.
That’s because there are a wide variety of Tasks that are both:
- Way too low-level & simple for your local Teams to waste time on, but also…
- Just a little too complicated (or too impractical) to fully automate with custom software.
This is the perfect gap to be filled by Brokerage Software Virtual Assistants.
Some of the tools in your Tech Stack that might warrant a Virtual Assistant to help streamline & outsource include things like:
- Transaction Management Software
- Website & Content Management Systems
- List Building & Skip Tracing Tools
- Marketing Automation & Drip Email Tools
- Power Dialers & VoIP Virtual Phone Systems
- Middleware Integrations (Zapier, Integromat, etc)
- Even activities within your actual MLS!
Essentially, if someone can login remotely, and the Workflow is repetitive enough to follow a detailed, step-by-step Standard Operating Procedure (SOP), you should be looking to outsource it!
Eventually your goal should be collaboratively working with your local Team and your VAs to ensure you’re building documented systems that maximize ROI on your Tech Stack.
Pros:
There are two big benefits of outsourcing menial, repetitive Back-Office Admin Tasks to a Brokerage Software Virtual Assistant:
- You’ll boost ROI by maximizing your Tech Stack’s effectiveness, and
- You’ll grow revenue by freeing your local Team to focus on Marketing, Sales, and Networking activities (that require their special expertise & physical presence).
By utilizing Virtual Assistants, you’ll be able to relieve some of your Tech Stack “mental overhead,” so you can better leverage software & your local Team (without wasting your already-limited time).
Cons:
The downside of outsourcing & delegating anything related to your Brokerage Tech Stack is always the setup process!
That’s because, before you can properly delegate these seemingly mundane day-to-day technology tasks, you’ll have to first carefully systematize & document out the step-by-step Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) … otherwise your Virtual Assistant will be working blind, and you’ll have no clear metrics by which to track their results.
This “Process Development” Stage is crucial (and painstaking) to ensure you get predictable, dependable results.
This can be a time consuming exercise, as it means carefully thinking through each step in the Workflow, to make sure that it’s:
(i) the optimal way for that Task to be handled, and
(ii) appropriate to delegate to a Virtual Assistant.
Fortunately, this is a one-time headache only, and once you’ve built out the SOPs, they can essentially remain the same (with very minor modifications) for years to come.
Work Estimate:
The best way to think about your Work Estimate for a Real Estate Brokerage Software Virtual Assistant will be based on how the software is used.
For software that is being used on a daily or weekly basis by all your Agents (like Marketing Automation, or website updates), the best way you can estimate the work required would be on a Per Agent Per Month basis.
As an example, let’s say you want a Virtual Assistant to make sure each Agent posts a quick update to their personal site or blog once per day. That might take 10 minutes each. If you have 100 Agents, that is 10 mins x 100 Agents = 1,000 Minutes … or 16 Work Hours Per Day.
On a monthly basis, that comes out to about 320 – 350 Work Hours Per Month (20 – 22 working days)… the equivalent about 2 full-time VAs.
On the other hand, for software that is used on a transactional basis (like Transaction Management or MLS postings), you can consider the Work Estimate based on a Per Transaction hard cost.
For an example, let’s say you have a checklist of listing-related tasks, that need to be completed (a) when a new Listing goes live, (b) when a Listing is updated, e.g. price change, pending, etc, and (c) when a Listing is closed / post-closing.
All combined, you might find this listing-related task list typically takes 3 – 5 hours over the course of each Listing (spread out over 30 – 90+ days). Then, if your Brokerage is taking on 50 new Sides per Month, you can guesstimate that, when everything is at its peak, you’ll probably be somewhere in the ballpark of:
- 50 new Sides x 2 hours (imagining only 1/2 of the total workload is required in the first month)
- + 100 sides from prior months x 2 hours (imagining the remaining 1/2 workload is completed for these aged Listings)
- = 300 Work Hours Per Month
Of course, these are very rough ways of calculating Work Estimates for this type of highly variable work!
That’s why, if you’re interested in putting some real world numbers to these example scenarios, the best next step will be starting to document out the step-by-step Procedure, and actually timing it yourself (keeping in mind, even in the best case, an Overseas Virtual Assistant will be quite a bit slower than you).