As your real estate investing business grows, it’s time to think about hiring a team to help manage your marketing and communications. This way, you can focus on speaking with motivated sellers and closing deals.
A lot of real estate investors hire overseas virtual assistants (VA) because it’s cheaper. You are not required to pay benefits, bonuses, or cover equipment. A VA can save you up to 78% in operating costs per year.
A well-trained and efficient VA can manage calls, SMS, and emails, nurture leads, manage your database, and much more, increasing operations and productivity. But, as with any hire, there’s always the risk of a bad egg, and a bad virtual assistant can ruin your business, sometimes in irreparable ways.
With some forethought, rigorous screening, and proper training, you can manage this risk. Here are four main ways a bad virtual assistant can ruin your business, and how you can circumnavigate the risks.
Risk #1: VA turns out to be untrustworthy
You are trusting a stranger, who may not even be in your local area, with confidential information about your business. You also trust them to make decisions on your behalf, with your best interests in mind. If this individual turns out to play the field, and shares your leads’ information with a competitor, or they sabotage you, even if it’s unintentional, you can lose sales opportunities.
The best thing you can do is perform a thorough background check of the possible VA, and outline the consequences of dishonest actions in the contract worker form.
Risk #2: VA is unprofessional
The biggest worry with hiring anyone is that they’ll act unprofessionally, and it’ll reflect badly on your business. A VA should have patience in handling leads, even the ones who get a little hostile, and remain coolheaded. They should recognize opportunities, know how to nurture and prequalify, and be on point in scheduling appointments on your calendar.
Remember: while exercising your own patience, the VA you hire may be new to real estate investing and how you like things done. If you want the VA to do well, you need to provide training. This is not an IF, it’s a must, and it should be continuous, as the VA continues to learn through guidance and experience.
You also need to do performance assessments on their responses and gauge their behavior with practice calls and emails. If you want them to manage your social media, provide them with a list of standard replies to comments, and after some time has passed, they should be able to handle original responses.
Risk #3: VA turns out low quality work
One of the reasons real estate investors hire local and full-time employees is because they can look over their shoulder at work every day. With a virtual assistant, you have to relinquish that control.
Instead of attempting to micromanage your VA’s work, set a trial period for a learning curve and check your VA’s work. If, after a short period of time has passed, the VA has a handle on things and is doing well, then you can let them work without your supervision.
Remember: everyone has bad days. If the VA is turning out low quality work, talk with them. Have a plan to correct mistakes and apologize to sellers if they were affected.
Risk #4: VA disappears
The best and most difficult aspect of hiring a VA is that they are a virtual worker. They are not with you in the same geographical space, and if they disappear (go offline), you have no way to reach them. Then tasks pile up, and deadlines are missed.
To avoid problems, negotiate to pay the VA per hour worked and on set days of the month. Second, set communication expectations between the VA and leads and with you. Schedule a daily check-in, where you and the VA discuss the current daily’s assignments and expectations, and establish milestones. If all goes well, you may start having weekly meetings, instead of daily. Third, define the VA’s shift, since they may live in a different time zone.
GoForClose Inside Sales Associates Are Better than Your Typical VA
GoForClose is the only all-inclusive marketing agency for real estate investors. We focus on Data, Marketing, and People, which includes our highly-trained virtual assistants, whom we call Inside Sales Associates (ISA).
The reason why we began the ISA program was to address the problem of finding good VAs. Many investors were being crippled by the poor performance of their staff. We decided to remove the hassle out of hiring, training, managing, coaching, paying, assessing, etc. We put our ISAs through in-depth training of our marketing platform and provide Real Estate Investing classes, so they understand REI, as well as the sellers and their different motivations.
Together with you, or your lead manager, your ISA handles 95% of the tasks related to marketing and lead generation, while you can focus on closing deals.
If you have questions or are curious to know more, request a free consultation below.
