Real estate agents juggle multiple roles. Although your main role in the eyes of your clients is being a salesperson and expert, behind the scenes you also act as your own CEO, marketing expert and administrative assistant. This puts a lot of pressure on your time and takes away from your true focus, which is helping your clients. A virtual assistant offers you a perfect employee, ready when you need them. Here’s how you should be using one!
Dedicated or Task-Based
One of the best things about using a virtual assistant is you can either work with a dedicated virtual assistant over the long term or simply hire them to perform specific tasks. You’ll pay less for a dedicated virtual assistant, but a good plan is to start sending tasks to a task based virtual assistant and slowly bring them up to dedicated status if workload allows.
Choosing an Expert
There are a number of different areas of expertise you can zone in on when choosing a virtual assistant including:
- Virtual Transaction Coordinators: Have someone to gather and organize the paperwork for your transactions. Even if you use an app, they can use it to do the work for you.
- Virtual Inbound Sales Assistants (ISAs): Get some help drumming up sales with someone to qualify new clients and nurture inbound leads. With people taking as long as 14 months to finally make contact with an agent, this can keep you top of mind with prospects until they are ready to commit.
- Virtual Outbound Sales Assistants: Having someone to cold call FSBOs, expired listings, and other potential lead sources can also help drum up business. These experts know how to work a cold call for lead generation as long as it’s legal in your state.
Menial Tasks
Offloading all those tedious administrative tasks like updating listings, capturing and entering leads and other data entry jobs can save you tons of time. Other menial time-consuming tasks include:
- Running credit reports on applicants
- Responding to inbound client e-mails
- Data entry
- Email correspondence
Researcher On Call
It can be hard to keep track of what homes are available. When you get inquiries looking for specific must-haves, a virtual assistant can do the research and send you a list of potential homes to show your clients.
Open House Logistics
There’s a lot behind planning an open house. A virtual assistant can make all the arrangements such as sending fresh flowers, setting up a stager appointment, ordering catering if needed, getting in cleaners, etc. You can then concentrate on checking every detail is complete on site.
Marketing
This is a massive time consumer. You can work with a virtual assistant to manage just about any aspect of your marketing including:
- Graphic design
- Improving your online presence
- Blogging and link building
- Social media
- Writing tasks
Virtual assistants have tons of tools at their fingertips to help them create stunning handouts, e-flyers and webpages. They can also often work on websites such as GoDaddy, WordPress and WIX. This means your listing updates and blog posts can be managed for you. Social media is a snap for virtual assistants who will bring fresh ideas to your posts.
Legal Risks
Your virtual assistant could be limited in the tasks they can perform based on state rules. In some cases, they might require a real estate license to solicit properties or even answer questions about your listings. Know the rules before assigning the tasks.
Lakeside: helping real estate agents close transactions across Maryland
Lakeside Title has a veteran team of title professionals who work together to ensure the highest levels of efficiency and quality for each of our transactions. We ensure all the moving parts for a real estate transaction go as planned.
We provide real estate agents with the quality title services they need to keep the ball rolling so you can focus on your transaction. You can be confident you’ll receive the proper documentation.
To learn more about how Lakeside can help you achieve a hassle-free close, call us today!
