Hiring a Real Estate Virtual Assistant

A virtual assistant can help with office tasks, schedule management, travel arrangements, and more. But what if you work in real estate and you need someone with specific experience in your world? What kinds of skills and experience should you expect if you hire someone with a background in dealing with real estate?

If you’re unsure of what you’ll have in a real estate virtual assistant, we’ve put together a brief guide on who they are, how they can help, and what it might be like if you hire one of your own:

In this article:

What a Real Estate Virtual Assistant DoesWhat Life Looks Like with a Real Estate Virtual AssistantDo You Need a Real Estate Virtual Assistant? Here Are Some of the Major BenefitsHow to Begin the Process of Hiring a Real Estate AssistantFAQ: Real Estate Assistants and Their Duties

What a Real Estate Virtual Assistant Does

Let’s say you’re a real estate agent and business is going well. You have a full-time list of clients that keeps you busy. But you also find that you can’t be in two places at once, which puts strain on the way you handle your business. Sometimes, it seems like there are not enough hours in the day to handle everything from data entry to follow-up to dealing with other realtors.

What do you do? The fastest way to expand is by hiring a real estate virtual assistant who has experience in dealing with these exact issues. Not only will they help you free up your time by handling your most menial and time-intensive tasks, but they’ll do it with skill and experience that you can’t get from just any virtual assistant. 

And what exactly can they do? Let’s take a look at some of their unique skills:

  • Real estate marketing. Real estate marketing is its own skill. Creating buyer’s packets, powerpoints, mailers, handling graphic design with sites like Canva, scheduling blog posts…they all come with their own unique subset of skills, which is why it’s important to hire someone with specific experience in real estate.
  • Real estate operations. From helping with transaction management to the data entry that comes with each listing, a real estate virtual assistant should have the knowledge and skills to take away your burden without constantly asking how to do everything.
  • Research. How well can a virtual assistant with a more general background conduct research? With enough time, they may eventually figure it out. But it’s far easier to hire a real estate virtual assistant who knows how to update your CRM with new notes on your leads, handle client feedback, research new leads for buyers and sellers, and access everything online.
  • Following up with leads. This is a common task for most virtual assistants, but in the world of real estate, you’re talking about following up with leads who are spending a lot of their hard-earned money on these major transactions. It takes a virtual assistant who understands that—and everything involved—to do this well.

What Life Looks Like with a Real Estate Virtual Assistant

In your real estate business, you’ve likely noticed that there are a few things you can do that you’re especially good at. You may also notice that some of your most important activities (such as showings) yield you the most results when it comes to generating leads and generating interest. If you’re stuck at the office handling marketing materials, research, and more—it leaves you less time.

And what if you notice that some of the essential work—like research on the MLS—is limited by the hours you have in a day? The only way to expand is to add someone to your team. A real estate virtual assistant that can be hired with reasonable hourly rates is a great way to dip your toe in the waters of expanding your team without making the full-time commitment of a full employee.

Real Assistant Assistant Working Remotely

Here’s what your life in the real estate industry might look like with a virtual assistant:

  • More productive capacity. Hard as you work, you have the same limits that we all do: you only have twenty-four hours in a day. Adding a real estate assistant to your team means you can have two people at the same time, allowing you to squeeze more value out of each and every day.
  • Outsourcing the activities you don’t like doing. Let’s say you were always a fan of serving your clients, but never the process of marketing and prospecting. Hiring a real estate assistant means you can have someone to tackle the activities you never liked doing in the first place. That ensures that not only do activities like prospecting and marketing get done, but they can be done effectively without you having to lift a finger.
  • Automate your daily life. Let’s say you’ve previously had to spend up to an hour a day just handling your own social media management. Or what about bookkeeping? There may be some things in your daily life that you always wanted to automate, but never fully committed to it because you were worried you would have to train someone with minimal experience. A real estate assistant can help change that.

Do You Need a Real Estate Virtual Assistant? Here Are Some of the Major Benefits

Still on the bubble about a virtual assistant for your own real estate business? Even if you believe there are talented and skilled assistants out there, it can be hard to see how making a hire like this can impact your bottom line. Let’s look at some of the statistics and the benefits that demonstrate why an assistant can help you:

Productivity: Getting Better at the Administrative Tasks

Admit it: the administrative tasks aren’t always your favorite parts of the day. If you’re in real estate, you likely got into it because of your passion for this business, your people skills, or some combination of the two. The administrative tasks that mark the day-to-day operation of a real estate business, however, are a different animal.

The good news is that hiring a real estate assistant can mean outsourcing the work not only to someone who’s equally as efficient as you—which would be nice—but may even be more efficient with these administrative tasks. As SmallBizTrends has noted, “remote workers are more productive because they have more control of their time and spend less time traveling to the office.”

Whatever efficiency your virtual assistant can bring to the table becomes efficiency within your own real estate enterprise. If they’re more productive than you at data entry, then it becomes less profitable for you to engage in your own data entry. If they’re more efficient at researching your market, then at a certain point it doesn’t make sense for you to handle your own MLS research, either. 

Cost: The Surprising News About Virtual Assistants

Ask anyone who’s never hired a virtual assistant before about the cost of adding someone and they’ll likely have some skepticism. It’s only a natural part of growing. After all, someone who’s worked in real estate might have some trepidation outsourcing any of their usual activities to someone else. They’re not used to it. If you’ve been good at, say, email marketing, why should you trust that a real estate assistant is going to be just as good?

Another major issue for many of these people: cost. They don’t trust that a virtual assistant is going to be worth the hourly rate it costs to keep them working. Even a virtual assistant only charging part-time costs can be a challenge for someone who’s never grown their enterprise before.

But you’d be surprised at what the numbers suggest. Cost is not only less of a factor for hiring virtual assistants, but it’s a major advantage when compared to what it takes to hire someone full-time. BestOfBudgets notes that a virtual assistant can save up to 78% on operating costs throughout the year. With a skilled virtual assistant, the question isn’t whether you can afford one—it’s often whether you can afford to avoid hiring one.

How to Begin the Process of Hiring a Real Estate Assistant

Already convinced? Then it’s time to look at the fastest way you can get a virtual assistant of your own up and running with your business.

Hopefully, you’ll have some idea of what you want your business to look like. You may even think about sitting down and explaining how you accomplish some things within your business, such a real estate prospecting, just to initiate someone who’s new to your business to the entire idea. But keep in mind that if you go about it the right way, you’ll be adding someone who already has experience in real estate to your team.

Here are the essential steps:

  • Sign up with us. This is the easiest and fastest step. With an account ready, you’re ready to move on to:
  • Get in touch with your customer success manager. We want to make sure that you have everything you could need to succeed with your new virtual real estate assistant. That means a member of our staff will work with you to ensure that you have a great match between your specific needs and the skills/background of the assistant you hire.
  • Select your virtual assistant. Matching your needs to the skills of a virtual assistant might seem easy, but it’s still worth taking some time to make sure you get it right. Making the right choice here can have a dramatic impact on the quality of the work you’re able to get done in the future.
  • Create a plan and get your VA plugged in to your business. What kinds of tasks do you need outsourced immediately? Which ones do you have long-term plans on, but not short-term needs? Prioritize the first tasks for your VA and make sure that they have everything they need to get started.

Start growing your business and reducing overhead with Delegated

1. Meet your assistant


We’ll ask you some questions to match you with one our virtual assistants as well as a backup assistant.

2. Create a workflow


Our platform gives you the power to create a workflow that fits your lifestyle. You choose how to track time, communicate, and share files with your assistant.

3. Start delegating


You have access to your virtual assistant 8am-5pm your local time. Start delegating tasks and grow as you need.
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FAQ: Real Estate Assistants and Their Duties

If you still have questions about how real estate assistants work and what they might do for you, don’t fret. Here are some of the most common questions we get asked:

What can a virtual assistant do for me if I have specific real estate needs?

Hire the right assistant and you’ll find out there’s a lot they can handle. From research on the MLS to handling your scheduling, a real estate assistant should be able to handle everything that makes your real estate business grow—but doesn’t require their physical presence. 

Which virtual assistant should I hire?

This isn’t an easy question to answer, since the answer is different for everyone. One thing we’ve learned to do is to match real estate agents and business owners with a customer success manager to help ensure that they’re identifying the right person to their specific needs. In real estate, that might mean identifying the types of independent contractors who can handle the needs of a real estate small business, or an effective researcher who understands the MLS, or how to conduct market research when the owner of the business doesn’t have time.

Do VAs really make good real estate assistants?

Not all of them. There are other VAs who might specialize in a different niche—legal virtual assistants, social media social assistants, and the like. It’s important that you specifically seek out those with experience and skills in this area. Not only will it make it easier for you, but it will provide far more value to your company than if you were to hire a generalized virtual assistant who’s new to the field.

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