Real estate virtual assistant services will always come in handy no matter what point in your business you are. Whether you are a real estate agent looking to get your business off the ground or a seasoned broker closing deals left and right, you will always find a use for a remote professional.
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You can’t afford to take yourself away from the core business processes just to study a new set of technical skills. You certainly can’t be bound to your desk doing paperwork if you get clients at a faster rate and do multiple showings on a daily basis. Perhaps you have been working way too hard and are just craving for me-time or family time. Whatever it is, a real estate virtual assistant services partner can take the time-consuming, repetitive tasks off your plate to improve your workflow and scale your business.
Outsourced real virtual assistant services range from administrative day-to-day tasks like data entry to processes more relevant to your business such as listing research, running comps, and inside sales. Even online marketing and brand promotion can be delegated.
Most of the time, a single virtual assistant can perform a set of these activities for you. A highly skilled professional can handle data entry, inbound email response, and lead generation.
When looking for real estate virtual assistant services, one of the primary considerations is the location. Where do you go to find the right service provider?
If saving is important to you as much as quality (let’s be honest, who doesn’t want that?), outsourcing will give you both. The popular business model allows you to tap into a global talent pool, enjoy increased flexibility, and reduce overhead and labor costs. With a global workforce at your fingertips, where do you turn to for real estate virtual assistant services that give you the best value for your money?
Outsourcing to the Philippines presents growth opportunities that leverage individual skills and talents without the financial burden of building a staff. It is the most cost-effective solution that provides you with a surprisingly huge legroom while keeping you within budget.
Ranking second in all of Asia in English proficiency, the Philippines is a globally competitive outsourcing destination for various reasons:
Sadly, it can be easy to dismiss them due to the lower costs, which are automatically regarded as subpar even though this is not always the case. Quality is not a trade-off you have to make when outsourcing real estate virtual assistant services to the Philippines.
Yes, you can confidently outsource bookkeeping, appointment setting, or real estate blog writing to a Filipino virtual assistant for a $5-$10 hourly payment. If you want someone with real estate expertise and experience to keep up with you with the more technical stuff, you can find a trained professional at just $9-$12 per hour.
How about potential time zone issues? Filipinos are used to working the night or “graveyard” shift. Call centers with fluctuating work schedules have prepared them for this after all. So, you can count on them to adapt to your schedule should you need them to; no risk of losing a client after being woken up in the middle of the night by your cold caller.
The short answer is yes. However, we are not going to pretend that it will be a cut-and-dry experience. We are not going to say there isn’t a bad apple in the basket because there could be, but we can help you weed them out from the good ones.
How do you do that? Just like any other hiring process, you will have to do your homework and set aside some time to find the right match. There are several platforms you can turn to that have features that will allow you to streamline this process for you.
1. Upwork is one of the biggest freelancer marketplaces for real estate virtual assistant services and general online work. This platform connects you to remote professionals from the Philippines and other parts of the world, but it is structured to favor freelance projects more than ongoing work.
You can post a job ad for free, but there will be 2.75% transaction fees for each invoice as you start working with a freelancer. You can upgrade to a Pro version for $149 a month if you want premium talent pre-vetted for you. However, you will have to pay an additional $500 per hire plus 10% of every invoice. Your virtual assistant will also be charged with 5-20% of the payment, which can be a lot for a Filipino.
You can get a glimpse of a contractor’s skills by checking the feedback provided by their previous clients and a “job success” rate based on their past gigs. However, this review system could cause you to miss out on the less expensive up-and-comers or professionals new to the site.
2. Fiverr is another global marketplace that sets itself apart by providing outsourced assistance for as low as $5. It sounds dandy until you are required to pay an extra 5% client fee, which makes it more expensive than most websites.
The fact that you have to pay way more for quality ($5 won’t cut it in this platform in our experience) because the lower end of the price spectrum is usually where low-quality freelancers reside, making the client fee all the more ridiculous.
In addition, this platform, like Upwork, is designed for freelance gigs, rush projects, or quick small one-time tasks so it might be difficult to hire a virtual assistant here for ongoing employment as well.
Finding high-quality work on Fiverr can be challenging, but when you find a good one (check their profiles for work samples and client feedback), you’d be impressed at what some freelancers can accomplish within a short timeframe.
3. MyOutDesk offers real estate virtual assistant services for real estate pros who are closing multiple deals every month, taking home a hefty revenue, or looking for assistance in core real estate-related tasks.
This platform trains Filipino virtual assistants with prospecting, online marketing, or administrative skills for real estate businesses. When you use this platform, you are connected to a trained professional based on your requirements.
The pricing is on the higher side, as you would expect. You won’t get to screen the applicants, but they appear to have a good qualification in place anyway. You’re looking at a minimum of $1,747 per month for a single quality-certified virtual assistant.
OnlineJobs.ph is the more economical option for real estate agents looking for a long-term virtual assistant. This platform boasts the largest database for Filipino remote professionals. Most of them are looking for full-time jobs, but the employment terms are almost always negotiable as are their hourly rates.
The free version allows you to post job listings and review applications, which gives you the opportunity to see if you can get your desired talent and pursue your search on the site or look somewhere else without the risk of losing money.
We believe the sweet spot is the $69 per month subscription, which will allow you to view resumes, profiles, and employer feedback of applicants and other contractors as well as hire them, of course. You can cancel the subscription anytime you want as well.
This is quite the bargain especially if you consider the absence of transaction fees and hidden fees. In short, you only pay for the salary and nothing more. Even better, the platform does not take any commissions from the salary so the virtual assistants get the money in full.
Another pro here is that if you don’t have the time to screen candidates yourself, the website can do it the recruitment for you for a $500 fee. If you want to do it yourself, you have a pretty solid refine search to play around with. OnlineJobs.ph allows you to filter by more than one skill at a time to narrow your search to your most specific needs.
What we mean is you can filter your selection to a professional with say, five-star English speaking skills, five-star real estate services experience, and four-star customer support skills. In fact, the site already has a list of real estate virtual assistants filtered out for you to check.
Maintain control of your day down to the hour by hiring a virtual assistant to clear up your schedule and unclog your inbox so you can easily manage your meetings and accommodate last-minute reschedulings.
This also gives you the chance to build trust and relationships with your clients. When a client moves the day of a showing, it can be difficult to just stop and come up with a thoughtful response especially when you are swamped with work. That’s where having an extra set of hands becomes well, handy because a virtual assistant can connect clients using a personalized reply, which shows that you actually value them and that they are not just one of the people you do business with.
The same goes for seeking buyer feedback on your listings. Delegating this task to a real estate virtual assistant will not just help you provide a more tailored experience for them, but also improve your business where it is lacking and foster client relationships.
A virtual assistant can also perform data entry tasks like property and comps research, listing updates, and lead updating. This will involve a bit of understanding or training on the software used for these purposes, but one that a Filipino professional can easily grasp.
If you have more real estate-related tasks to hand over, get a virtual assistant with a background of the industry to fast-track onboarding. Otherwise, a general virtual assistant will do. Besides, you will find Filipino professionals with several years of experience performing these tasks, and they charge at just $3-$8.
An inside sales associate builds and maintains relationships with your leads for you until they are ready to buy. Qualifying leads and nurturing them through each level of their buying readiness will take up so much of your time. So much. You see, the time between your first contact with a prospect and the actual sale can be more than a year.
Even with little to no training, a virtual assistant with real estate knowledge will be ready to provide the nurturing and attention your prospects deserve and properly cultivate interest into a sale however long it takes.
A certain degree of technicality and a good chunk of time is involved in making sure your website runs at the optimum level. It is a real time-burner, but a crucial part of gaining and sustaining prospect engagement and brand presence, which is all the more reason to let a real estate virtual assistant services provider handle it.
A virtual assistant will be responsible for developing a streamlined experience for visitors by getting them where you need them to go and laying the path clear for them to find everything they need. This is by ensuring all the elements in every single page from the links, forms, and landing pages, to the pictures, graphics and everything in between appear and function as they should. A bad navigation link or a low-quality image can turn a potential client away and will reflect badly on your image. A virtual assistant can also set up preventative measures such as adding ancillary tools on the website to avoid downtime and ensure long-term website sustainability.
This virtual assistant will also ensure consistency in the design and feel of the website, examine website performance through analytics, enact improvements where needed, and optimize the content for traffic and rankings. The beauty of it all is that they do it for $4-10.
If your advertising or marketing needs some work, you know it will eat up most of your time if you do it yourself especially without the right skills to match. Real virtual assistant services can help with this in various ways. You can hire a virtual assistant proficient in writing, graphic design, or content marketing.
You can find real estate virtual assistant services that can handle a set of marketing tasks for you if you want well-rounded efforts to improve your online presence. It might be best to get two people to share the responsibilities though. Two Filipino virtual assistants will still cost less than a single local one.
Writing blog posts is an excellent way to get leads. It has become instrumental for real estate pros who want to make a mark in the industry in this day and age. High-quality long-form content is needed to get you noticed on Google so you want someone comfortable writing a 1,800-word blog post without the fluff.
The thing is, writing good content is one thing, but to get it at the forefront, you need to optimize it for search engines. This is crucial especially if you are just starting out. So to be able to get some traffic to your website organically, your real estate virtual assistant services partner should also have a bit of SEO knowledge.
If content writing will be a major part of your marketing strategy, hire a writer who specializes in real estate. With the insider knowledge and experience, a specialist will project greater authority on the subject than a generalist writer who will likely have to research it all first. As usual, expertise drives costs, but it will not be much hiring a Filipino professional. A local real estate writer will cost you $25-$95 per hour, but you’re just looking at $10 for an experienced Philippines-based writer.
When looking for a specialist on OnlineJobs.ph, refine the filters to find a virtual assistant who has a five-star real estate services skills with five-star writing skills to match to ensure he can get that knowledge across to your audience.
But is it possible to get high-quality real estate-related content from a generalist? Absolutely! A skilled content writer may have a surface-level knowledge of your industry at best, but they can make up for that with excellent research skills and writing creativity. That’s what makes them effective general writers in the first place. Even better, they charge less. A Filipino general writer can produce amazing content for you for an hourly rate of $4-$6. We wrote an article on content writing and blog writing to help you hire the absolute best writer services for your business. In the article, we discuss:
If you are focused on releasing brand-centric content, a direct response copywriter might be needed for the job. This type of writer produces a copy that immediately converts and has the potential to be a gift that keeps on giving.
Usually, you won’t hire someone full-time for this. You won’t necessarily need a specialist for this either, just someone with a compelling, client-focused way with words and an understanding of the importance of data and testing in determining client needs and improving your advertising efforts. Filipino virtual assistants can handle this for you for $12-$48 per hour.
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A skilled graphic designer can create all sorts of promotional and marketing materials for you–from brochures, postcards, and other branding designs to PowerPoint presentations, infographics, and social media posts.
By now, you know the importance of having graphics. You don’t want to drive customers away with a block of text on a blog. Graphics add a little depth to your text. By themselves, graphics can grab user attention and make an instant impact. It is an effective medium that condenses information and gets your message across while making it easily absorbed by users who are on the go. Humans being the visual creatures that they are, they respond better to information delivered visually. Why else do you think infographics are popular?
On the branding side, a graphic designer will make sure your documents, business cards, and presentations look professional and consistent. It sends a message to your client that you pay attention to details.
A Philippines-based graphic designer will charge you hourly for $3-$8. You can hit two birds with one stone by availing of real estate virtual assistant services providers who can do both writing and graphic design.
Social media marketing done right allows you to tap into the global reach of mega social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. From there you can engage with potential customers by posting content, running ads, participating in discussions, providing industry news or express tips.
Each social media platform can be used for unique purposes so a real estate virtual assistant services provider should be able to whip up a different approach to maximize each of their potentials.
Overall, your outsourced professional can help you increase audience engagement and generate leads by posting photos on Instagram, sharing useful content on Facebook, and tweeting out listings on Twitter.
Due to its visual structure, Instagram is the best way to show off your properties. You can post beautiful shots of a certain property for the billions of users to like and repost. Unlike other platforms, it allows you to show more of your brand’s personality as well.
Facebook is mostly where the content is promoted, making it the perfect avenue to establish yourself as a thought leader in the industry. It can also be used to be more connected with your audience by answering frequently asked questions, sharing tricks and tips through infographics, data and stats, industry updates, or company testimonials.
Twitter, on the other hand, presents the easiest way to extend your networking circle by connecting with influencers, business owners, and other industry leaders. LinkedIn is a useful tool best wielded when building your professional reputation and connecting with millions of businesses and other professionals.
Social media marketing is clearly a crucial tool for your growth that you likely won’t have time to perform yourself. Thankfully, you can hire a Filipino real estate virtual assistant willing to do it for you for $3-$15 per hour.
Videos are becoming more popular in the real estate space because of their popularity, shareability, and easy consumption. Recent stats show that 50% of marketers enjoyed the best ROI from video and that it grows revenue 49% faster than those who do not use it. Imagine being able to reap all those benefits for a fraction of the cost with a Filipino virtual assistant who can transform your ideas and message into a compelling video.
By posting well-edited videos of properties, real estate tips, your market, or the neighborhood, you showcase professionalism and at the same time build your brand and establish credibility. Videos are a great way to showcase your knowledge and expertise while letting your personality shine as well.
If you are trying video for the first time, you can get a freelancer who can edit one for you for a fixed rate. Remember that it could get difficult and time-consuming to re-orient a virtual assistant every time you need a video so anticipate the frequency of your releases so you know if you need to hire task-based or full-time. Either way, you are looking at $5-15 per hour.
BookkeepingWhether you are a broker or an investor, this is one of the best ways to outsource real estate virtual assistant services as it will give you a quantifiable view of the growth of your business.
An outsourced hire can keep an organized system that allows you to keep track of your cash flow as well as your profits and losses to measure your growth.
A bookkeeping virtual assistant will also help you be on top of your taxes and manage your cash, bills, and expenses while also accomplishing general tasks such as receipt collection, mileage tracking, and payroll. You can outsource this service for $4-$10 per hour.
Local knowledge. If you need someone with knowledge of your local market or neighborhood, it would make sense to go with a virtual assistant who lives in close proximity as opposed to someone working thousands of miles away.
However, if you don’t have the budget but have the time, a Filipino professional with the drive and the willingness to learn will not be held back by geography and can be trained to the nitty-gritty details of your specific market.
Philippines-based professionals with excellent English communication skills will also make for good cold callers. If you are worried that the neutral accent is not going to cut it, you can test them during the hiring process by interviewing through video or audio.
Maintaining accountability. Working with someone miles away from you can make collaboration quite difficult. Thankfully, tons of software and applications can bring team members from all over the world closer together.
We at Awesome Outsourcing use Hubstaff to track works hours and overall productivity. The program takes a screenshot every 10 minutes to ensure that your outsourced hire is well, working. The application also shows you what tasks take longer for them to accomplish. We double down by asking for end-of-day reports to get updates on their progress and their struggles.
If you fear that you might end up spending more time monitoring your virtual assistant when you are outsourcing tasks to have more time on your hands, establish your expectations and put together a system that will streamline your communication to improve accountability.
You won’t have to worry too much about this with a Filipino professional though. Most of them value a career or a job that allows them to put food on the table. They are loyal to an employer who takes care of them so you can count on them to perform their best.
Establishing trust. If you have been handling every facet of your business, outsourcing real estate virtual assistant services can be a hard pill to swallow. However, if you want to increase your productivity and scale your business at a faster rate, outsourcing becomes a logical step for you.
Virtual training. Most Filipino professionals will know their way around CRM and MLS. So unless you have a very specific way of doing things, they will be ready to start working once they familiarize themselves with your business. If they are new to the technology you use, there are tons of online resources they can use to learn it. However, we find video training more effective.
Yes, you can simply record a series of videos detailing everything a real estate virtual assistant needs to know about your business and their day-to-day responsibilities including screen-sharing of how to use certain programs. You can include best practices and any tricks and tips that could simplify the process.
The great thing about doing this is that when you reach a point in your business when you find the need for expanded real estate virtual assistant services, you can reuse these videos to onboard new team members.
Potential language barriers. Filipino remote professionals are very proficient in English. Also being a highly Westernized country stemming from the historical connection that dates back centuries, cultural differences will not be so much of an issue. So when you lay out the instructions, you can trust them to follow through.
To avoid miscommunication and misunderstanding, be clear and concise. Encourage your virtual assistant to ask questions. Have them include the questions in their progress reports. Sometimes, Filipinos tend to be shy to ask questions because they think it is a sign of incompetence or that it reflects badly on them.
Thankfully, more and more professionals are starting to realize that full understanding of a task allows for a smoother workflow and minimal mistakes, so this is becoming less of an issue.
Reflect on your needs and the needs of your business. You must have an idea of the scope of tasks you will delegate to your virtual assistant so you won’t have to risk underusing one.
Take a closer look at how you spend your day and take note of the responsibilities that take most of your time but aren’t exactly driving or generating business.
If you are new to outsourcing and would rather test the waters first, hiring a task-based virtual assistant or a freelancer is a good entry point. This is an affordable setup that you won’t require you to design a new system or prepare for a massive shift in the dynamics of your business. It requires little to no effort from you.
If you go with freelancers, keep in mind that you won’t be the only employer they work for so you may not be a priority. If you want changes or corrections on their output, requesting them might be difficult. This is why this type of real estate virtual assistant services is best suited for one-time projects and experienced VAs.
Having someone with the knowledge and experience in real estate is not always required, depending on the tasks you need to get done. If you simply want to gain more control of your schedule, add a personal touch to showing invites and rescheduling conversations, or update listings, a general virtual assistant will be able to do that. They either have done it before or are willing to learn.
Real estate specialists will usually be the ones who will need training if you hire them for this set of tasks although it could be a good investment especially if you reach a point where you need assistance that involves more core-related tasks. With the higher price tag that comes with them, however, trained real estate professionals will be best suited for performing tasks in line with their expertise. They can streamline processes and produce work with experience or knowledge-driven insight that a general virtual assistant will spend hours researching or even understand.
Real estate virtual assistant services will also be best outsourced to a specialist if you are a real estate veteran focused on simply meeting clients and closing the sale. Generating leads and setting appointments are often tasks that require real estate training so as to foster a deeper understanding and connection with your prospect and personalize conversations, which will result in a more tailored solution and sales pitch. As such, a knowledgeable virtual assistant will generate leads, qualify them, and nudge them in the right direction for you.
Hiring real estate specialists also make sense if you have the budget for it since they can handle much bigger tasks, which will not just free up more of your time you can use to generate more revenue or spend time with your family, but also scale your business faster. A good real estate virtual assistant services provider might even offer ideas that could present greater opportunities for your business.
There are real estate tasks that unlicensed virtual assistants won’t be able to do for you. So, familiarize yourself with the rules of your state or check with your lawyer. Fortunately, most states allow outsourced professionals to perform the tasks that you would normally want to hand over to them.
If you decide to hire an independent contractor from a marketplace, create a job listing that can help you weed out applicants immediately. The thing is after you post a job ad, you’re likely going to get plenty of responses. As such, you should know how to streamline the screening and hiring process to save some time.
It can be overwhelming and laborious to wade through each application. You can instantly narrow down the list by adding an “easter egg” in your job description. For example, include a simple task at the end of your post like using a specific email title when sending the application so you can instantly discard the ones who did not read through the entire ad with just one look of your responses. Instead of checking each and every application, you can use your time to check profiles and feedback scores of those who pass the first test.
For voice services, require an audio recording from the get-go. For example, request a video or audio describing what your business is in their own words after having them look at your website. This way, you will know if their English skills are good enough for you and whether or not they can effectively communicate your business to a potential prospect.
Real estate virtual assistant services have become one of the biggest strengths of the Filipino remote workforce. Whether you are new to outsourcing or building a virtual team of real estate professionals, you are sure to find something for your needs.
If you are ready to take the plunge, don’t forget to download our free training below to make the most of your outsourced services and learn what else outsourcing can do for your business.
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