When businesses expand quickly, entrepreneurs are sometimes overwhelmed by small tasks, compromising their strategic thinking and productivity. Surprisingly, nearly half of the American workforce spends nearly fifty percent of their work hours on managing menial tasks such as scheduling calls and meetings.

Worse yet, these low-value work activities can take a large portion of a person’s enthusiasm and passion which they could otherwise channel toward business development ideas. The real estate business is no different. Small, low-value tasks can come in the way of closing deals and making profits and decrease your overall performance. One way to avoid such a situation is to hire a virtual assistant for your real estate business.

Benefits of a Virtual Assistant for Real Estate

The benefits of a virtual assistant may vary depending on their specialty and your needs but in general, a VA can help a real estate business in the following ways:

Real Estate Appraisal Assistance

If you’re running an appraisal business, a specialized professional can help you a great deal. Instead of hiring one as a permanent employee, you can get need-based consultancy from a specialist VA. You can also get formats and files such as Excel, completed by an IT expert working in real estate remotely. These forms and valuation templates can help you and your team collaborate easily.

Keep Your Work Going 24/7

You can hire a virtual assistant from your time zone or you can select one from a different time zone. You can hire from countries like India who can work when you are sleeping. The overnight work arrangement may help you plan and execute your next-day tasks better. For example, you can delegate a task at the end of your day and your VA can complete it overnight, increasing your productivity manifold. Similarly, you can hire a customer care assistant from a remote location who can keep your customer service open around the clock.

Minimum Overhead Costs

According to Global Workplace Analytics, businesses can save up to $11,000 by switching to a partial work-from-home arrangement. Full-time VAs are even more cost-effective. They work on hourly contracts so you only pay for the task you get them to do rather than for the whole day. Moreover, the wages in countries like the Philippines are much lower so you can cut costs even more. Hourly contracts also mean you don’t need to worry about your VA going on vacation. You can get a backup for such an occasion. Furthermore, people working from home also reported more work satisfaction so it’s a win-win for everyone.

Hire the Best Talent

Real estate may seem like a local business but you may not get the best talent from your locality, especially if you’re operating on the outskirts of a large city. You can hire someone residing in the city or even from a different city if you think they have the best skills. If you require a VA for technical tasks or digital marketing, you can even hire from a different country.

More Work Hours

People waste hours of their time commuting from home to the office. Long-distance commute also impacts productivity. Remote work can save that time for the person you hire thus increasing their overall well-being. They can then focus on creative work better and contribute more to your cause. A Gallup survey also confirms that remote workers log more hours. They are also said to be better engaged with their tasks.

Three Ways a VA can Help Real Estate Businesses

Effective delegation of tasks to a virtual assistant can boost your creative ability and save you valuable energy. Small tasks that fill up your creative space can go to your VA while you focus on closing the deals and increasing your revenue.

You can ask your VA to assist you in the following ways:

1. Administration

• Equipment ordering and maintenance schedules: Businesses are increasingly shifting online which makes it possible for a VA sitting at a remote location to order equipment for your office. Moreover, they can keep track of inventory and schedule maintenance activities to keep everything updated.
• Communications: Almost every aspect of real estate involves floods of emails, queries, estimates, proposals, and communication with potential clients. If you’re spending your time replying to a constant barrage of emails, you’re wasting your precious time. A VA can reduce all that pressure from you. You can train them to filter out irrelevant emails and queries and send you only the most important ones.
• Meeting plans: At its surface, the task of planning meetings seems simple but for an expanding business, it becomes too complex to handle efficiently. You can delegate making these plans to a VA including scheduling, calendar management, meeting and conference call plans, daily itineraries, and action items.
• Staff support: A VA can also support your staff. For instance, you can hire a VA who’s an HR expert and can do the interviews, recruit, and support the staff by solving their daily issues. You can also get experts in HR software to keep track of employee productivity.
• Miscellaneous tasks: No matter how organized your company is, there are always some tasks popping up now and then. That’s when a virtual assistant can come in handy. Since many VAs are multi-talented and have good problem-solving skills, you can delegate these random tasks to them. 

2. Digital Marketing

• Streamlining marketing strategy: contemporary marketing strategy requires an integration of traditional and modern methods. Digital marketing has taken over many domains of marketing but you cannot rely only on digital because real estate clientele belongs to diverse age groups. That’s why you need a marketing expert to streamline your marketing strategy and a virtual assistant can do just that for you.
• Email marketing: Email management and email marketing are two different things. A successful real estate business requires cultivating relationships with your potential clients and keeping people in the loop. Email marketing is a great way to achieve this goal. A qualified virtual assistant can run your email marketing campaign effectively.
• Lead generation: Real estate lead generation relies on inbound marketing which basically is content marketing and outbound marketing which is more traditional and relies on a personal approach. A talented VA can help you with both of these methods. They can also help you buy real estate leads from different platforms.
• Social media marketing and management: Real estate is one of the businesses that have benefitted the most from social media. The reach and convenience these platforms provide are matchless. Not every business is effective in leveraging the potential of social media because many real estate entrepreneurs are not born into the world of social media. It’s a no-brainer that in that case, a VA can be your best option for social media marketing and management.
• Ad campaigns: Google, YouTube, and Facebook ads can be highly effective in generating hundreds of leads. But generating these ads and posting them is a complex mechanism, one you don’t want to spend time on. Instead, you can hire a VA to run your ad campaigns.

3. Technical Assistance

• Software installation and maintenance: Whether you’re working solo or with a team, as a real estate entrepreneur, you’ll need to use tools and software to maximize your productivity. A VA can help you install such software packages and can also help in their maintenance such as debugging and updating.
• Technical training for staff: The best thing about virtual assistants is that you can hire them on an hourly basis. That means you can get any skill set online for a limited period including technical training professionals. They can help you train your staff on productivity, time management, sales, marketing, and using software and tools needed for real estate success.
• Video and photography editing: According to 3M corporation, our brain processes a video 60,000 times faster than text. That’s why a video is essential for increasing sales in the real estate market. A virtual assistant can help edit your videos and photos to make them look more professional. You can get logos, theme colors, and brand identity in your photos and videos by hiring a VA who knows how to use software like Photoshop.

Bottom Line

Hiring a virtual assistant for real estate is as effective as for any other enterprise. When your small business is expanding, a VA can help you stay organized and focused. Moreover, you can find a VA for a highly technical problem at an hourly rate, saving money and time that you would otherwise spend on hiring a specialist at an exorbitant salary. Furthermore, remote work is better for the employees so you’ll get more productive, better engaged, and happier professionals when they are working from home.

References:

1. https://www.entrepreneur.com/living/menial-tasks-eat-up-the-majority-of-the-workday-for-most/271382 
2. https://hbr.org/2016/06/stop-doing-low-value-work 
3. https://www.forbes.com/sites/theyec/2020/09/09/how-a-virtual-assistant-can-help-your-business-this-year/?sh=73767ee43182 
4. https://fortune.com/2022/08/15/how-much-money-employers-save-switch-remote-hybrid-work/ 
5. https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/working-papers/does-working-home-work-evidence-chinese-experiment 
6. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/02/25/how-much-of-your-life-youre-wasting-on-your-commute/ 
7. https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/170669/remote-workers-log-hours-slightly-engaged.aspx 
8. https://www.businessinsider.com/millennials-own-less-real-estate-than-boomers-statistic-2020-1