How to Use a Virtual Real Estate Assistant to Close More Deals

Real estate professionals are increasingly turning to virtual assistants to help them stay on top of their workload and spend more time on strategic activities including building client relationships and crafting more effective marketing messages. In this article, we’ll dive into how a virtual real estate assistant can help you with:

• Contact management
• Listing support
• Lead management
• Social media support
• Email marketing support
• Basic admin support

All of these processes save you a ton of time and enable you to focus on the key activities that close deals.

1) Keep Your Contacts Organized & Updated

As a real estate professional, your relationships are everything. However, keeping track of everyone you know and remembering to follow-up at the right times can be a challenge even for top producers. We’ve worked with real estate agents whose contacts were distributed across multiple spreadsheets and accounts and, within a couple of weeks, consolidated them all into a single platform and organized them to best meet the agents’ goals. This made it easy for them to find and follow-up with contacts. Here’s how to leverage a real estate virtual assistant for contact management:

• Give your VA access to all of the places where your contacts are stored.
• Choose where you want all of your contacts to be centralized and how you want them organized. If you’re not sure what’s the best way to organize your contacts, just ask your Engagement Manager and they’ll give you some suggestions.
• Your VA will then consolidate and organize all of your contacts. If there’s any missing information, they’ll find and add it.
• Moving forward, your VA will ensure every new contact is added, organized and stays up-to-date. They’ll also include notes about each contact’s life such as anniversaries, kids, etc.

With a real estate virtual assistant, all of your contacts will always be updated and easy to find. Many of the real estate professionals we work with also have their VAs set reminders to follow-up with contacts so that they ensure that their relationships stay healthy.

2) Save Time on Posting Listings

Posting your listings on a variety of sites and keeping them up-to-date is a critical but time-consuming task. A real estate virtual assistant can save you several hours per property by having them post your listing on sites including:

• MLS
• Zillow
• Trulia
• Realtor.com
• Your site
• Any other place you post your listings

All you have to do is give your VA all of the properties information in a word doc (or whatever you prefer) and they’ll go to each site and fill out the listing forms. Your virtual assistant can help you prepare to post listings by:

• Coordinating with your photographer
• Adding your photos and copy to brochure templates
• Coordinating landscaping
• Helping with other objective tasks

With all of the time you save on preparing and posting listings, you focus more on client-facing activities such as staging the property and building relationships with potential buyers.

3) Lead Management

If you’re getting leads via Zillow, your website, and/or other real estate listing site then you know how time-consuming and tedious effective lead management can be. A real estate virtual assistant can take over all of the logistics of lead management so you can focus on crafting messages that convert your leads into clients. Here’s how:

• Have your VA reach out to leads using email templates that you create. Depending on your workflow, you can have your virtual assistant send email templates with more information about your properties or have them offer times to meet with you.
• If the lead is interested in learning more, your assistant will loop you into the conversation.
• If you use a CRM or excel to track leads, your VA will add new leads to your system and continuously update their status as they progress through your funnel.

Having a real estate virtual assistant will help you expand your lead generation efforts since you’ll have extra time to invest in your marketing efforts and the capacity to process more leads.

4) Strengthen Your Social Media Presence

A report from the National Association of Realtors found that social media yields the highest quality leads for most realtors. However, many agents struggle to build and maintain a strong social media presence because it’s so time-consuming. A real estate virtual assistant can streamline your social media marketing efforts by:

• Uploading and scheduling all of your social media posts.
• Notifying you about comments and messages that you may want to respond to. For example, if someone likes a photo of one of your properties and asks if there’s going to be an open house.
• Monitoring your analytics and let you know key info including when posts about certain properties are receiving high engagement, what days of the week see the best performance, etc.
All you have to do is give your VA the content you want them to post on each platform and they’ll take care of the rest.

5) Streamline Your Email Marketing Campaigns

The real estate sector has one of the highest email marketing open rates at 42%. It’s an effective way to showcase your best offerings and keep prospects engaged while they explore what real estate solution is right for them. Like with social media marketing, all you have to do is create your content since your virtual assistant will:

• Set up the content in your email marketing system.
• Flag replies that you should see.
• Monitor your analytics to let you know what’s working and what isn’t.

If you set up clear processes for uploading listings, posting on social media, and creating email campaigns, your real estate virtual assistant can drive all of your online marketing with minimal effort from you.

6) Admin Support

In addition to supporting your real estate activities, a VA can also save you time by tackling your day-to-day admin work. Here are three tasks you should consider offloading: 1) Document Preparation You can save a ton of time by having your assistant prepare all of your documents for you. They can format any standardized document and set it up in DocuSign. If you give your assistant templates, photos, and copy, they can also create all of your:

• Brochures
• Flyers
• Ads
• Happy birthday/anniversary/etc emails

Offloading these tasks gives you more time to craft the right messages for your contacts. 2) Scheduling + Calendar Management If you work with a lot of vendors for events and/or to prepare your properties, you can offload the majority of that coordination to your real estate virtual assistant. When you’re ready to schedule meetings, CC your VA and they’ll take care of the scheduling ping-pong. You can also have your assistant follow-up with your vendors so that late deliverables don’t slow down your progress. 3) Research Staying up-to-date on what’s happening in your market is essential. If you give your virtual assistant clear criteria about the information you’re interested in, they’ll deliver insights to your inbox at the frequency you desire. Some of the topics real estate professionals have their virtual assistants research include:

• Upcoming neighborhood events
• Mortgage rate trends
• Demographic trends in their area

You can your VA research any topic as long as you give them clear guidelines about what you’re looking for.

Learn More About Real Estate Virtual Assistant Services

This article offers just a glimpse of the many ways a virtual assistant can support you. To learn more about how we can help your real estate business grow, click here!