What is the number one thing holding most agents back from success?
It’s all the small work they have to do.
I have a question for you. Are you building a business? Or building a job?
Are you spending all your time doing $10 an hour work that someone else could be handled for you.
Like researching leads, researching property data, finding phone numbers, or contacting leads?
Somebody else can handle these smaller tasks.
Here is how a virtual assistant can manage a system that gets you listings.
Task #1: Pull Leads and Scrub Them
Have a virtual assistant pull leads for you.
You can have your virtual assistant start with the typical, well-known leads, which are Expireds and FSBOs. They can help manage, pull, and prospect those leads.
Your assistant can work with Redx, which is what I recommend, to get the Expired and FSBO leads.
In addition to those standard leads, they can also help you get the much easier-to-list leads, where you don't have any competition.
I'm talking about the vacant homes, the inherited homes, the divorce homes, the people who are behind on their property taxes, and the delinquent tax leads.
All of these leads are much easier to list. A virtual assistant can do all the work to find and pull those leads for you.
They can find the leads using public records. They will be your county's records.
Your assistant can then find the leads’ phone numbers and mailing addresses.
You can hire a full-time person, usually for about three hundred dollars a month, to do nothing but work on leads.
They will quickly master this skill, and you will have an abundance of great leads that you can work at any given time.
Show them how to use the Redx and look up these public records.
Task #2: Prospecting
The next task that you can hire out or teach the same assistant is prospecting.
Now, if you want to have an assistant use traditional prospecting, like a script, you can have that person call and set up listing appointments for you.
That's not what I recommend, but it is an option for you. I prefer to hire someone to call sellers.
First, this assistant will make sure the person is interested in selling.
Next, he/she must determine whether the potential seller has an interest in another realtor.
The assistant must get the seller's mailing address so that you can mail them marketing material. If you're a member here, this is where you mail them your book.
Then have your assistant call and try to set up a listing appointment. If your offer/book won them over, it will be easy.
If they are good on the phone, with or without a script, they'll be able to get you into the door for a meeting.
They can do all the work and bring you practically pre-sold listing appointments like this.
But, this is also where your pitch and body of work has to speak for itself.
If your assistant happens upon a lead that's not selling right now, he or she can follow up with those leads later.
If it's done right, they can secure the listing for you once the seller is ready.
The assistant can do all the work to prospect these leads.
They can also follow the warm leads method that I recommend to prospect and set up listing appointments for you.
Here is what I do that gets the most listings. When I first started out, I did a lot of cold calling.
I actually became fairly good at cold calling. I wouldn’t say that I was the best at it.
But I got listings, and that’s what mattered. I developed my own scripts, voice inflection, and methods for handling objections.
However, I knew there was a better way. So, I put a lot of time into direct mail. I’ve obtained many listings from direct mail.
Then I started mailing out books. That worked even better than direct mail. And, eventually, I found that this worked best:
Mail the sellers a book and then follow up by phone 4-5 days later. If you're not a member, mail them any material you have.
Just make sure it has information to be valuable to them.
This is warm calling.
You get the results that a good cold caller gets – without the rejection. Often, when you follow up, people recognize your name.
“Oh yeah. You’re the guy who mailed that book (or letter) to me”, they say. We recently did a marketing test here in Jacksonville to see how this worked.
We had ten for-sale-by-owner (FSBO) homes, and we sent all ten of them a copy of our For-Sale-by-Owner book.
Out of those ten FSBO homes, one owner called back on his own, and we met with him to talk about listing his house. However, we went back and called all ten FSBOs, and we set up appointments with two more of them.
Because we follow up after mailing the book, the owners are already pre-sold on working with our team. They're already interested.
They had simply procrastinated about calling us. So, when we follow up, we’re able to quickly set an appointment.
The bottom line is, we tripled the results we would have had from just mailing out the book and waiting for them to call.
Task #3: Lead Follow Up
When you get really busy, you're not going to have time to do your own follow-up work.
I lost several listings because I did not have time to follow-up on my leads. I was too busy with other listings.
I met with a seller, and she said she was going to list her house with me. She was just going to wait 30 days to get some final things done before putting it on the market.
However, I got so busy over the next 30 days, that I never followed up with her.
About 45 days later I realized my mistake and checked the MLS only to find that she had listed her house with someone else the day before.
The other realtor had found her lead, called her, and won the listing because I hadn’t followed up. That was a listing I could have had.
She was completely sold on what I could do, but she didn't list with me because I hadn’t called back.
I lost several listings that same month because I was too busy. When you have your virtual assistants doing your prospecting, have them help you out with your lead follow up.
Have them stay in touch, and you'll get more listings because when we're really busy, we don't have time to follow up as we need to.
Virtual Assistants can help fill in the gaps because they're not busy going on listing appointments.
Task #4: Convert Buyer Leads
A virtual assistant can handle all of the tasks involved in converting a buyer lead into a buyer client.
They can help with the buyers by calling or emailing them, setting listing alerts, and developing rapport.
Now, obviously, you have to be very careful. You want to make sure the assistants don't talk about anything related to real estate.
They just need to get the information about the type of house the potential buyer is looking for.
Then they send that information over to an agent who can find the buyer the house that works for them.
The assistant’s job is to find opportunities for the buyer’s agent to land a lead.
Of course, there are many steps to the buyer’s side of real estate, not all of which are discussed here.
But a virtual assistant with the proper training can accomplish almost all of this. Turning your buyer leads into buyer clients.
Task #5: Help You Get the Listing
They won't literally win the listing for you.
But they can do tasks that help you win the owner over.
One of the agents in our office secured a 3-million-dollar listing. He told the seller that he would put together a floor plan of the house and post it on the MLS and through all of his other marketing.
The virtual assistant put together the floor plan for the realtor. He got that 3-million-dollar listing.
Virtual assistants can also help you with enhancing your listing photos.
If you want to hire a professional photographer, the assistant can find the best professional photographer in your area.
They can write the remarks and the copy for your listings. You could tell the client that you have an in-house marketing copywriter who writes all the remarks for the listings. The virtual assistant could put that together for you.
They can help set up single-property websites. They can help with virtual tours, or listing videos.
There are all kinds of ways that an assistant can help you with your online marketing.
They could also help you run, and manage, Facebook ads, advertising your listings.
An assistant can help you with all the smaller tasks, giving you more time to focus on working with the owner.
So these are some of the tasks you can get done with a VA. But how do you hire them? What do you pay them? How does the training go?
Imagine You Had A Business Like This:
- You didn’t have to set up the appointments.
- You didn’t have to mail out anything or email your list.
- All the grunt work is handled perfectly.
Our team has written a book that shows you how to build a business that runs itself. We go over hiring, paying, training and anything else you need to know about VAs.
Joe Nickelson is a real estate professional dedicated to helping home buyers and sellers achieve their dreams of owning property, and helping real estate agents stop using the sometimes-vicious tactics that weigh on their consciences. He believes that the Smart Agents books will, quite literally, change people’s lives for the better. Check out his full bio here!
