Virtual Assistants for Real Estate: The Income Revolution
Everything's changed since 2020 . . . except bankers. (They still wear suits to work everyday.)
But otherwise, it's a different world. Working from home isn't rogue or weird, it's the norm. And hiring a virtual assistant for real estate duties is not only acceptable, but quite common now.
That has led to a "hack" that's improving morale, increasing profits and allowing people to achieve dreams they never thought possible.
And it starts with the actual hiring of a virtual assistant. For Real Estate Brokerage purposes, let's talk about how this is a move can drastically improve your brokerage and your life.
Let's get a baseline by starting at the typical revenue / expenses breakout in a brokerage:
In simple terms the office expense and payroll are the largest chunks of the expenses, and rightly so. But in this income producing "hack" we'll specifically look at Office, Payroll, Office Supplies and Marketing expenses which together make up 63% of the total.
The Costs of Employees vs Virtual Assistants
Most brokerages, perhaps yours, consist of a physical office location and handful of employees. Typically, the employees inside a brokerage are a receptionist, office manager, transaction coordinator, marketing manager and systems expert (all depending on the size of the brokerage.)
The salary of an employee isn't all they get paid. There is so much more, it's hard to even calculate, including the costs of:
An HR Department
Employee Legal Compliance
Training and Discipline
Office Equipment like desks, printers, chairs, pens, paper and printing cartridges
Health Insurance
401k
Cobra
Payroll Management
Not to mention the office itself.
On the other hand, virtual assistant is a negotiated rate. Everything else is taken care of by the Virtual Assistant Agency.
Think about the mountains of cost savings. Have you seen your "office expenses" line item lately?
This is why you often find yourself . . .
Wishing there were 28 hours in day.
Wishing you could clone yourself.
Wishing just had 10 extra workers one day so you could just get everything done at once.
Wishing that for one day, one measly day, that everyone on the team would work as hard as you do. .
Hiring a virtual assistant for real estate agency help should be the first order of business towards improved profitability.
Which Positions in a Real Estate Brokerage Can You Use a VA?
In the beginning stages of opening a brokerage, the office manager and receptionist are the same person covering the phones, planning internal parties, coordinating showings, producing and update MLS listings, ordering office supplies, filing, managing appointments and more. As a brokerage grows however, there's often enough work to break them into multiple positions.
Transaction coordinators are much closer to the functions of the real estate transactions. They oversee all aspects of the buyer and seller needs like coordinating inspections, managing escrow, executing legal agreements and communicating with all the parties. In some places this role requires a real estate license, but in either case remote or virtual transaction coordinators are available.
Marketing managers (and their support staff in larger agencies) manage the MLS, advertising, listing photos, market research, digital marketing and most other marketing activities. Taking on a virtual assistant for real estate marketing activities makes more sense than hiring on in-house. Other than walking neighborhoods with door hanger ads, VAs can do most everything. And they traditionally have done so for multiple companies and can bring lots of fresh new ideas.
Virtual Assistant Productivity
Workplace productivity is the most studied and discussed topic among today's corporations. Office productivity is abysmal at best with employees getting distracted up to 65 times per day.
Not only that but employers have added a great deal of perks to the office to improve morale and productivity, but for the most part the nice new Keurig in the kitchen just means more people are hanging out in the kitchen.
Virtual assistants on the other hand, work remotely with a much higher job satisfaction number. Since they're productivity is tracked with tools like Clockify, they login when they're ready to work and be productive.
Task tracking software makes sure they do all the internet surfing on their own time, which is a great reason to hire a virtual assistant. For real estate office employees vs VA comparison, there really isn't a comparison. Try it out for yourself!
Give a VA and an office employee the same tasks nonchalantly, without telling them they are in an experiment and see what naturally happens. When you pay a VA for forty hours of work, you're getting 40 hours of productivity.
In fact, according to the industry study, Freelance Forward Economist Report, put out by UpWork freelancers and virtual assistants work 36 hours per week.
That's compared 12.5 total for office workers.
Consider all the miles you put on your car showing homes, meeting clients, doing neighborhood research. Now, imagine how inefficient your money would be spent if your car was on every day from 8 am to 5pm. Imagine it burning gas in the parking lot while you were in the office. Imagine how often you'd have to fill up the gas tank?
That would be a lot of money for very little productivity.
But what is the cost of going virtual?
Since 2020 when remote work became the norm, there are few practical reasons to still carry the overhead of a physical location, but they are quite miniscule.
Walk-ins looking for a realtor
Main Street "front of mind" branding
A place to meet (sign papers, pick up keys, etc.)
According to the National Association of Realtors Annual Reports for the last five years, walk-ins are less than 1% of the way buyers and sellers find Realtors. That means if your Brokerage has 100 clients right now, only one of them would have come from walk-ins.
The idea of having your building and signage on the corner of main and main was once incredibly powerful. But now more people work from home and don't even drive the roads they once did.
Plus, the internet and referrals are the largest activities that bring in new clients.
Some of the most prominent Realtors in a town become that way because they sponsor the local baseball team, advertise on grocery store shopping carts, use social media well and are generally present in a geographic area.
There is actually a overlooked benefit to losing the physical location. Many people look to hire the "local Realtor" and feel if your building is on the other side of the county, they'd rather go with someone close. Not being tied to a street name has its advantages.
And finally, meeting clients can happen anywhere. Closings often occur at the office of the Title Agency or Lawyer. And many meetings have been had at Paneras and Starbucks nationwide. Not to mention places like Fueled Collective in Cincinnati or Success Factory in Nashville where a private conference room can be rented for $25/hour.
The real benefit in flipping to a virtual office is the 28% of your income going to the Office Rent and related Office Expenses. Even if you own the building, you'd be better off renting your space to someone else and generating revenue from it instead of it being a 28% cost drag.
How does going virtual change the numbers?
What if the real reason to hire virtual assistants was for real estate profits?
In the example above, based on a typical real estate brokerage, the office was bringing 20% profit after expenses.
If you take out the office rental expense of 24% and you lower the office expenses from 4% to 1% (because you can't eliminate office supplies all together) . . .
Then you can reduce the payroll from 25% to 16% by using virtual assistants. You can do this because you're no longer going to be paying for holidays, personal time and water cooler chit chat. Your overall admin hours might be cut in half.
On the flip side you might end up doing more marketing. A natural reaction to losing a sign on the street would be to pick up additional marketing opportunities.
Without an office meeting clients at Starbucks and Panera might increase thus doubling meals expense from 4% to 8%. That would go hand in hand with transportation as well.
Keeping software and professional fees the same you come out with a 39% profit number, instead of 20%. That's a significant difference and maybe would give you some room to try things you've always wanted to try.
And you don't have to lose the camaraderie of working with people either. There are virtual assistant agencies like ours that covet the relationships and face time that come with having an admin assistant.
The family feel
Hiring a virtual assistant for real estate office efficiency doesn't have to mean you lose the family feel of having employees.
Not all virtual assistants are faceless transaction-based relationships like you create on Upwork and Fiverr. In those places you load up tasks to a dashboard, see the task completion bar and await the results.
We hire professional virtual assistants in almost the completely opposite way. We look for VAs that have all the necessary work skills and people skills. They want to be part of your weekly meetings and serve as an extension of your office. We take pride in matching clients and VAs 1:1 making sure the VA has all the necessary skill sets.
We specifically seek out virtual assistants for real estate brokerages. We understand how they make a difference and try to produce positive results daily.
The heart of Alpine is the tone set by our Founder. There are no emergencies. Nothing we do warrants late-night calls or weekend meetings. We genuinely enjoy hiring talented VAs who want to work remotely and matching them with quality, reasonable clients who need help reaching the next milestone of their business or are looking to create a margin in their work/life balance. We celebrate when we see a VA thriving and when we hear from a client that their VA has made a significant difference in their lives (personally and professionally).
If you're interested in using virtual assistants in your real estate business, we'd love to talk to you. We can help.
