Location, location, location. That’s right, we’re talking real estate, but precisely your location within your real estate business!
Much like other businesses, you provide a specialized service that requires time, training, and, frequently, testing, and certification to get started. The investment you’ve made in yourself makes your time valuable. You shouldn’t be spending time doing things that don’t require your specialized knowledge! (See our other blogs on the Why to hand things off and How we do it!)
Whether an Agent or an Investor, so much of the real estate world is about timing. Finding the right person or place at the right time, making sure an offer is just right, following up to make sure you’re the one on their mind, and a VA can help with most of these details.
We’ve put together a quick list of some ideas for what real estate professionals can give a VA to make their businesses and lives run smoother.
- Need to make sure you didn’t
miss a vital inquiry or response email, but your inbox feels overwhelming or messy? A virtual assistant can sort through your inbox, answer questions, send documents, flag items for you, and make sure your communications are manageable. - Research can encompass so many different projects that are imperative to the decisions you need to make! Everything from finding similar properties for comparables to hunting down information on a property sale, auction, or open house can be time-consuming. Sometimes, the data can be hard to find, especially if the info changes regularly with world events. Let a VA dig in to find, confirm, and update the information so you can focus on making the data work in your favor!
- An example of something that crosses between Research and the CRM areas is when you need to spoil a client or set of clients. Decent restaurant in a particular area that takes reservations? Want to send gifts to people who send you referrals, but not sure what you can do in your budget? A virtual assistant can take your specifications and make sure your events, big and small, are set up for success.
- Let a virtual admin help manage client and vendor relationships alike in a way
that works for you! Job updates from property managers, contractors, or other professionals getting forgotten or lost in the shuffle? Can’t remember if you have all the paperwork from a client you need? A VA helping to organize and update your CRM means the data works for you and keeps everyone up to date with the next steps. - Social Media is a consistent issue for any business owner, and those in the real estate industry aren’t immune. A virtual assistant can make sure your business page is posting regularly and you’re interacting with potential partners, clients, and referral sources. Being consistent with this also helps with Google in terms of social trust rankings, which are critical for getting people to choose you over all the other options.
- Accountability and Project Management is as much about those little items that are easy to get lost in the sea of ‘everything else’ as the big projects.
A reminder that you need to call ‘Sue’ before the end of the week or that ‘Bob’ had to reschedule your appointment tomorrow can cause havoc with last-minute stress if they get lost. CRM work overlaps with Project Management when you need to follow up with specific projects, but it can also remind you that you wanted to switch the marketing campaign target demographics to reflect your best clients better. If things are getting lost, falling behind, or just feeling like you aren’t getting anywhere, this can be a massive piece towards feeling like things are moving the right way. - The final item on this list is one of Alyssa’s favorite things: templates and procedures. These can come into play with every item we’ve mentioned previously and, honestly, something we’re going to do to a degree no matter what tasks you give us. There are probably similar documents you need in most deals, so turn it into a template to save time! Know the criteria you’re searching for in properties, even if the location or other factors change? Write up a standard operating procedure so there are fewer questions and allows new tasks of the same variety to be upland running faster. If it’s repeated, even if with small variations, it can have a template made around it. It saves time, money, and allows you to share tasks and grow faster than having to recreate the wheel every time.
Hopefully, this sparked a few ideas for how a VA can help you, even if they don’t possess in-depth knowledge about real estate.
For questions or a quick consultation, you can schedule an appointment with us here!