Are you looking to hire a real estate assistant to help you get your job done? Have you ever wondered what roles or responsibilities to have them do, but weren't sure which ones? Here are 7 types of jobs to consider hiring an assistant for.
You can find a real estate assistant whose full time job is to compile, research, and generate leads. If you want to go after less competitive sources, like vacant homes or people facing foreclosure or divorce, those leads are hard to find, but because they're hard to find, there's normally less competition when you're pursuing them.
This is a really good responsibility to give to an assistant. Whether they're researching physical leads or expired leads or going after vacant properties and finding the phone numbers of the sellers and how to contact them, lead generation is something they can do. You can also have an assistant call, email , and start the conversation, even going as far as actually setting up appointments.
This could be anything from generating and running Facebook ads to doing social media and posting content. It could also be following up with your sphere of influence. Essentially, marketing is anything from lead generation to postcard campaigns to emails, to even managing the blog, depending upon which methods you use to generate leads.
I've seen real estate agents be very successful with this. For an example, one real estate agent built out an ISA team, and they did everything from generating the leads (and they were pursuing mainly FSBOs and expireds) to calling FSBOs and expireds and setting up appointments. So finding leads and looping them in are connected, but an inside sales agent, it's something you can definitely hire an assistant to do.
And before I forget, if you want to go deeper on these and get more specifics, download our guide or get our copy of a free guide at smartagents.com/VA. Check it out.
If you're mainly a listing agent or you're generating a lot of new listings and you have to advertise them, there's a lot that goes into promoting them. How you advertise your listing helps you get more of them, because sellers say, hey, this guy or gal does a really good job; I want to hire them to advertise and promote my listing. There's no reason not to get a listing and turn that into more listings and sales.
If you're not doing that, you're leaving a lot of money on the table. I know that's not rocket science. Pictures are crucial, and we've all seen the pictures that are the disasters. But there's one way that's really easy to enhance them, and that's to have someone who has photo editing skills, so they can enhance it and make it look good. Going out and putting your listings on all the different websites, setting up a single property website or writing a good description or building out flyers are also important.
Or even doing a floor plan. People on Zillow and Realtor.com are looking for floor plans, but most agents don't do it. I think it's a big mistake, and it's easy to have an assistant do it.
Five is client support.
Client support is anything from answering the phone to setting up appointments to scheduling buyer meetings to managing your calendar. If you have a lot of buyers and listings, there's a lot of things to communicate, from feedback to stats, and it needs to be often enough that you maintain your clients' trust so when you go ask them for a price reduction, you get it.
Obviously if you're newer and you don't have lots of listings and lots of buyers that you're working with, this as a smaller job and less important, but as your team grows, managing relationships with your buyers and sellers is something that can be outsourced to an assistant.
There is so much that goes into this, and depending on if you're in the US or Canada, and how much your title company or or title attorney does for you, there's can be a lot that can go wrong here. So obviously if you have an assistant help, having somebody that is very detailed and makes sure each and every step happens when it should. Communicating with the listing agent and the buyer's agent and the seller and the buyer is really important, as well as bringing stuff to your attention, like a inspection report that could derail the deal. There's so much here that is crucial to your commission and your income. (And theirs!)
So if you have a lot going on, this is something you can easily have an assistant do so you can devote more time to stuff like listing appointments and bringing in new business.
A general admin could do anything from listing coordination or maybe some lead generation and scrubbing, to calls or managing your appointments and emails. There's so much here, and I'm not going to go into huge detail, but you could have somebody start in general administration and just take miscellaneous work off your so you can grow your business.
As your team grows and as you get more business and more clients, you can have a more specialized job in mind for who you hire in general admin. When you're a smaller team and you're getting started, you're responsible for wearing all these hats yourself. And this is why I think so many agents fail in the business. So the next step is hiring an assistant then deciding what is the primary role you want your assistant to eventually have.