Are you a busy real estate professional that doesn’t seem to have enough time in the day?  Are you getting buried in paperwork keeping you from prospecting?  Or, maybe you have the administrative area covered, but need to increase your bandwidth. For a realtor that feels like they’re doing everything, but doesn’t feel ready for a full-time in-house assistant, hiring a virtual assistant in your real estate business may be what you need.  If you’re new to this world of VAs, you may be asking yourself what is a virtual assistant, what can they do, and where do you hire them?

A virtual assistant is anyone that works remotely assisting someone in their job duties.  They can be an Onshore VA or Offshore VA.  Meaning they can be as close as the same town or as far away as another country.  In general, it doesn’t make a difference where they are located as long as they can perform their job duties. 

3 Virtual Assistant Categories

Virtual assistants are generally categorized in one of 3 categories: Admin, Marketing, or Prospecting.  This doesn’t mean that an admin VA can’t do some marketing, or a marketing VA can’t make calls.  For the most part, they are categorized this way to emphasize their primary skillset.  So when hiring a virtual assistant hire based on what your primary objectives are.  If there are a few crosses overtask you need, make sure the VA has a general idea of how to do the task or is willing to learn them.  Keep in mind, when you’re hiring a virtual assistant for real estate tasks, you’re probably hiring a non-licensed assistant.  Make sure you follow your state’s laws when assigning tasks to your VA.  For the most part, non-licensed virtual assistants can do almost everything except discuss the details of properties and write contracts. 

When it comes to hiring your virtual assistant you first need to decide whether you want to hire an onshore or offshore VA.  Below is a list of Cons and Pros of hiring an Onshore or Offshore VA.