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Working in the real estate industry is no easy feat. As a real estate agent or business owner, you’re a multitasker. You factor in economic changes, market supply and demand, and compliance policies while taking care of the administrative side of your business. Realistically speaking, keeping up with everything is not always possible.
Thankfully, the growing demand for virtual assistant services and a real estate virtual assistant (VA) means having an extra pair of hands. A real estate VA is akin to an administrative assistant or a right-hand man. Their job responsibilities encompass not only the usual customer or administrative support but also content creation and marketing. Below, we’ll delve deeper into the many hats of a real estate virtual assistant.
What Are the Responsibilities of A Real Estate Virtual Assistant?
While virtual assistants are often perceived as all-rounders, some assistants specialize in a particular task. Before hiring virtual assistants for your real estate business, here are the most common virtual assistant services you can outsource, divided by job category.
Administrative
Administrative tasks are what keep daily business operations going. In the standard workplace, they’re performed by executive assistants. Common administrative support tasks include data entry, appointment setting, and many more. Let’s tackle them below:
1. Data Entry
Though tedious, data entry is one of the most important administrative tasks. Virtual assistants organize, input, cross-check, and update customer data. They also process contracts and legal documents as well as track sales and transaction records.
Organizational skills, accuracy, and proficiency in customer relationship management (CRM) systems are essential for this role. By delegating data entry to a real estate virtual assistant, inaccurate client information and outdated transaction records are the least of your worries.
2. Calendar Management
From high-value tasks to appointments, real estate agents are always drowning in workload. A virtual assistant responsible for calendar management helps real estate professionals organize their day-to-day tasks and meetings according to urgency.
Beyond setting dates for day-offs, virtual assistants also assist in booking flights, listing the agenda for an upcoming meeting, creating a to-do list, and many more. By hiring a virtual assistant with calendar management skills, you can enjoy a year’s worth of increased productivity and efficiency.
3. Appointment Setting
Appointment setting and calendar management have overlapping roles. However, as the name implies, the latter mainly centers on scheduling agent-client meetings and ensuring all involved parties come prepared with all the necessary paperwork. Additionally, real estate VAs generate leads for potential clients, vet clients, and initiate follow-ups post-appointment.
Knowing a foreign language is also an advantage. This way, your virtual real estate assistant can assist non-English-speaking clients with their property needs without language and cultural barriers. This improves client relations and boosts satisfaction, allowing you to cater to customers from different cultural backgrounds.
4. Bookkeeping
Virtual assistants are equipped with basic bookkeeping skills. They monitor your expenses, process payments, send invoices, and create financial reports and statements. While you don’t necessarily need a full-fledged accountant for this role, your real estate VA must exhibit keen organizational and mathematical skills and mastery of accounting programs. Because this role involves sensitive financial details, your virtual assistant must practice data security and privacy.
Content Creation and Marketing
Content creation and marketing go hand in hand. Content creation refers to the production of visual or written content for clients. While creativity is involved, it is also one of the most mentally taxing and time-consuming tasks.
On the other hand, marketing encompasses tasks that involve the promotion and selling of products — more like properties. Below are content creation and marketing tasks you can outsource to your VA.
1. Graphic Design
No real estate business is complete without eye-catching visual designs. Unfortunately, not all realtors are skilled in the visual arts. The solution? A real estate virtual assistant with graphic design skills.
In this role, your real estate VA can create marketing materials, social media graphics, brochures, and infographics to present property information in a visually engaging manner. They incorporate your brand’s signature elements into every design to maintain visual consistency.
A real estate VA who excels in graphic design can also retouch your property photos, so your listing can attract more potential clients.
2. Copywriting and Content Writing
Writing is everywhere, even in the real estate sector. While copywriting and content writing are used interchangeably, there’s a difference between the two. Copywriting induces emotion and pushes the reader to take action — such as buying a product — whereas content writing informs the reader on a particular topic.
A real estate VA with copywriting skills can craft snappy marketing copy that convinces why your clients need to buy your property or home. To achieve this, a copywriter approaches the copy with the client in mind, sprinkling descriptive, enticing words and crafting a thought-provoking narrative about the property. When written well, potential clients can click on your listing and reach out to you — the real estate agent.
A real estate content writer can create engaging blog articles about anything and everything real estate — whether it’s buying your first home or determining property value. Content writers research keywords for search engine optimization (SEO) and understand search intent.
Because they write for readers and search engines, their articles must be well-researched and SEO-friendly. This way, the articles will rank at the top of the search results — potentially attracting new clients.
3. Video Editing
For a potential buyer, photos and descriptions are not enough. A beautifully edited video can amaze even the most reluctant buyers. A real estate VA who excels in video editing knows what audio to embed and when to use text overlays, visual effects, and transitions.
Through meticulous editing, your remote worker can showcase your property in ways that compel potential clients to make a purchase.
4. Market Research
Market research delves deeper into the complexities of the real estate industry to ensure the success and viability of your real estate business. Market researchers analyze supply-demand trends, monitor housing markets, compare property prices, conduct a SWOT analysis, and formulate data-driven action plans.
A real estate VA with market research experience has an in-depth understanding of the real estate sector and marketing research methods. Presentation skills and a degree in finance, accounting, or a related field are an advantage, too.
5. Content Marketing
Content is everything, and word of mouth only does so much if real estate realtors want to succeed in the industry. With the help of a virtual real estate assistant, your real estate business can generate new leads. Virtual assistants can help you create a detailed buyer persona and identify your target market.
This way, your writers and graphic designers know the type of content they can produce on your website. There’s SEO involved, too. Your real estate VA can assist writers in keyword research to drive traffic and improve search ranking. They can also work with graphic designers to produce fresh visual content.
Taking advantage of social media platforms is a plus, as they serve as avenues for uploading and promoting content — drawing in potential clients and keeping existing followers engaged.
6. Email Marketing
Email may be an old-school communication method, but email marketing has elevated its role to new heights. With email marketing, your virtual real estate assistant can compose newsletters informing a potential buyer about property leases or property purchasing. In addition to email composition, your remote worker can organize clients’ emails according to preferences or anything they deem fit.
Virtual assistants can create targeted emails and provide tailored recommendations for a more personalized experience, which helps build strong client relationships. Another responsibility of your real estate VA is monitoring the performance of your business’s email campaigns.
This can be gleaned from conversion rates and other key metrics, helping real estate professionals and virtual assistants identify points for improvement.
Customer Support
Customer support is the provision of assistance to clients. Real estate businesses invest in customer service to boost customer retention and satisfaction. Check out how a real estate virtual assistant can take care of your business’s customer support:
1. Customer Care
Whether through phone calls, email, or live chat, customer care is the backbone of your real estate business. Real estate VAs with customer service experience are, first and foremost, customer-oriented. They understand the importance of building a professional rapport with clients and other realtors.
Beyond helping clients with real estate-related inquiries, virtual assistants must understand customers’ needs and resolve issues. To provide faster customer service, virtual assistants create templates for common inquiries and pre-made responses. While speed is important, clients feel more seen and understood when responses are empathic and personalized.
2. Cold Calling
Cold calling may be intrusive or unnecessary. But when done right, it can benefit your real estate business. A real estate virtual assistant who knows the cold-calling game will establish feasible goals for the call and prepare a script to guide them throughout the correspondence. Moreover, they’re not afraid of making offers and providing a strong value proposition. Real estate VAs also honor their promises, following up on buyers when necessary.
Since cold calls are often seen as scams, virtual assistants add a personal touch through extensive background research of their potential client. This way, your real estate VA can start on the right foot without sounding like a scammer. Respect, active listening, and professionalism are must-have traits, as a potential client may reject your VA’s offer.
Real Estate Support
Real estate support covers all day-to-day real estate tasks. Below are three examples of these tasks:
1. Property Creation
Property creation and management take a mental toll on real estate professionals who are already overwhelmed with work. That’s why such tasks are delegated to real estate virtual assistants.
They create property listings containing snappy headlines, high-quality property photos, and descriptive property information. This role involves a bit of writing, as virtual assistants need to choose words that accurately describe a property’s features without embellishment.
Real estate VAs can also include nearby local attractions — natural or otherwise — and provide an overview of the neighborhood, giving clients a sneak peek of what life will be like after purchasing your property.
Attention to detail is important here. Hence, virtual assistants must double-check not only the grammar and word choices, but also the price, property size, and other key information. Completed property listings are then uploaded on social media and real estate websites like Realtor.com
2. Property Management
The real estate industry is volatile. That’s why property management is essential for any real estate business. For real estate VAs, this means updating prices and information to ensure the property’s relevance and visibility on websites and social media. Aside from that, virtual assistants answer customer queries and create performance reports of all property listings.
3. Property Research
In the real estate sector, there’s beauty in research — even if it’s tedious. In this role, virtual assistants identify market trends and opportunities as well as find new leads and properties from different neighborhoods. All research findings are then collated into a report for your real estate VA to send to potential leads. Thanks to property research, your real estate business becomes ahead of the curve.
Outsource Real Estate Virtual Assistant Services to KDCI
A real estate virtual assistant is the closest you can get to a superhero. Skilled and customer-centric, they do everything they can to drive profit and convert customers for you. When hiring a real estate VA, be specific with your requirements. Do you prefer VAs with good research skills and finance degrees? Or do you like those with general VA skills and a few years of real estate experience?
There’s no right or wrong answer here, as everything depends on what your real estate business needs now. Unfortunately, finding the ideal real estate virtual assistant is challenging. If you don’t like investing time in screening and interviewing candidates, you can outsource virtual assistant services to top property management agencies or BPO companies.
KDCI Outsourcing is your best choice. As one of the best BPO companies with a solid reputation in the industry, we help real estate business owners achieve operational efficiency at lower costs through outsourcing, building them a team of real estate professionals who specialize in a particular role.
Want to give outsourcing a try? Contact us, and we’ll tailor our outsourcing efforts for your business needs!
