Many real estate agents and business owners turn to virtual assistants to handle tasks they don’t have the time or expertise for. This is where you come in as an experienced virtual assistant in the Real Estate spaces.
To stand out from other VAs, you want to provide services that others don’t offer. This uniquely positions you as an expert, and clients will be willing to pay a premium knowing that they won’t have to worry since their work is in the hands of one who knows what they’re doing.
Some of the best services that you can offer your clients in this space include the following:
1. Real Estate data scraping:
If you are not familiar with data scraping, it is the process of extracting data from the internet and putting it into a format that your clients can then use.
This means you will have to research each real estate site with property listings to find all photos, videos, open/closed status, location information about schools nearby or other amenities like pools and fitness centers.
This is important because it ensures that your clients’ listings are accurate, up-to-date, and have high-quality photos that are representative of the respective properties.
It also ensures that your clients will never get a complaint from potential buyers about their property not having enough information or looking dated.
Data scraping that you will be doing will revolve around three main types:
- Property details
- buyer and seller information
- Agents’ information
Of all these three, the majority of your tasks will fall under property listings. You’ll need to scrape parameters such as:
- Area or location of the property
- Photos: Real estate sites like Zillow
- Price of the property / Asking Price
- Bedroom and bath count
- Previous owners of the property
- Workplace proximity/ co-working spaces
- Square footage or total size of the home or apartment.
- Utilities included in rent or for sale price (or both) such as electricity, gas, water/sewer, cable TV, internet service provider.
- Local amenities such as laundry facilities, pet-friendly, parking spaces and proximity to schools or parks.
Thus, it goes without saying that to do data scraping well and more effectively, you need to know how to create and run scripts using a language like Python.
2. Posting ads on Real Estate listing websites
To achieve success with the Real Estate business, investors leverage the audience that big websites like Zillow have built through running ads.
As a virtual assistant, you can offer real estate clients your expertise in placing ads on these websites. This service would cost the client a monthly fee, but there are additional benefits as well.
If you’re an expert at posting ads to website listings, then you can add this to your service packages to set yourself apart and even enable you to charge a little bit more than the competition.
And if you have a proven strategy of running successful listing ads, you can even start positioning yourself as a Real Estate listing expert and start targeting established realtors with huge monthly marketing budgets.
The trickiest thing about posting these types of ads usually comes down to tracking metrics like clicks, impressions, number of views, etc., and ensuring that your clients’ investment in running listing ads is in away impacting their bottom line.
When the campaigns are live, monitor the performance and work with other staff from your clients’ end to improve conversion.
3. Administrative Tasks
Running a Real Estate Business is just like any other form of business. There are all sorts of mundane tasks that take up your clients’ time. To help them win back some of that valuable time asset, you can offer administrative tasks such as:
- Booking travel arrangements for clients
- Organizing home staging
- communicating with agents, receiving, and screening calls from buyers or sellers
- Managing clients’ calendars; setting up meetings, rescheduling appointments
- Filing paperwork such as contracts
- Preparing and distributing documents such as invoices or bills
- Maintaining a real estate database system by uploading data or creating files to help clients keep track of their properties. This might include updating client sheets with information about the property
These are just some of the many administrative tasks you can offer to your clients as part of your packages. Still, it is important not to extend this list too far, or else they will be overwhelmed by what you do and may even stop using your services altogether. Stick to those that can save them much time, and yet necessary.
4. Conducting Research
Research is very vital in Real Estate as it helps clients to make a decision.
This can be anything from finding properties that match their needs in the respective MLS to researching neighborhoods in a particular city or sharing what trends are taking place there.
Your client will rely on your research to determine:
- Which agents they should meet up with,
- What neighborhoods to look at,
- What properties they should consider buying or selling on behalf of the owners
- Which homes they should list
- what trends are currently influencing the industry and how they should respond
- What real estate competitors in their area they should look out for
- Conducting market research on real estate trends in a particular area.
- What leads they should pursue and details about them
These decisions will be arrived at based on the findings due to your research, making the decision-making process quite easier. You can present these data in a format that can be easily scanned, analyzed, and interpreted by the clients without a refresher course in data science!
5. Scheduling home viewings
Scheduling and rescheduling showings can be time-consuming and tiring, both for sellers and buyers. As a virtual assistant, you can help make this process easier by scheduling and rescheduling showings for them.
Your task will revolve around coordinating with your client, agents and sellers on what day would be best for home-viewing and managing cancellations without having to worry about any missed information.
You will also need to make sure that the showings are accurate, keeping your client’s preferences and needs in mind. You may even be able to offer advice on how best to prepare their home regarding decorations or other aspects like a garage sale!
You’ll also be tasked with keeping track of who would be attending the showings coming by sending them an email confirmation before they get there to know where everything is all set up and ready for them when they arrive at the property.
This saves not just time but energy as well-meaning clients often forget things like this.
It would be helpful if these emails were customized depending on what they were coming in for, i.e., a showing or an open house.
It’s also important that when scheduling showings, you provide enough notice beforehand so that both parties can make necessary arrangements, such as picking up kids from school in advance of a showing.
On top of this, if there happen to be any changes needed regarding the time slots, then always communicate them immediately, so nobody thinks twice about what went wrong because of no information provided by the other party involved.
6. Marketing Tasks
To successfully run a Real Estate business, your client needs to spend a considerable amount of time creating and distributing marketing assets. As a virtual assistant responsible for marketing aspects of your business, you will be helping with tasks such as:
- Creating and updating social media posts
- Designing promotional materials such as postcards, posters, and flyers
- Publishing articles on the website or blog to increase web traffic
- Updating the blog with links to articles about real estate
- Creating and optimizing marketing and sales funnels for agents, sellers, and buyers
- Managing email campaigns
- Designing an ad campaign for online or offline advertising, like print ads in newspapers and magazines.
- Create Landing Page Content.
The marketing assets you’ll be creating will target three main customer personas, namely buyers, sellers, and agents.
Thus, the marketing tasks will vary depending on whether the campaign is designed with sellers, buyers, or agents in mind. For example:
Sellers: If you’re designing an email campaign for a seller, your goal would be to encourage them to list their property with your client. To persuade them to do this, you can create content around how much money they can make from selling their home. Also, email funnels should address how easy to list their property with your client’s site.
Buyers: your task might include promoting properties on websites like Zillow or Realtor.com as well as finding new listings using search tools such as Google Maps so that you can send them out through social media platforms.
Agents: you may also be required to develop campaigns designed for agents, which could include providing tips and insights about how to get the best results from their listings or sharing relevant research data through email newsletters or monthly industry and reports. An agent-focused ad campaign might include tips for staging their listing, such as ways to make the home more appealing and welcoming.
Every day, your clients will expect you to provide them with a list of new properties that meet their criteria so they can make an informed decision about whether they want to visit those homes. It is important for you as the agent’s virtual assistant to be able to
7. Creating Content
If you have experience in content writing for SEO and copywriting, then you can offer this service to your Real Estate clients. Content marketing is huge in a realtor-focused business.
You can create blog posts, videos, and other types of content to help educate your client’s customers about the property buying process and how to market their properties for sale.
You can:
- Develop detailed search-optimized blog posts to attract potential buyers, agents, and sellers to your client’s website.
- Create content for listing properties in marketplace websites, helpful if you know how to create exceptional listing descriptions that get buyers interested.
- Create and proofread video scripts to promote your client’s business.
- Creating blog posts to be published in other real estate-focused blogs as guest posts to and help your client get more exposure and tap on the targeted audience.
- Develop a list of how-to videos to create on YouTube for your client’s business website or social media channels, such as Facebook.
- Create content that will be published in magazines and other publications about your clients’ real estate services and what their business does differently in the industry.
- Create lead magnet materials such as reports, whitepapers, checklists, etc. This audience should be warmed up through the sequence before introducing the offers.
The thing to remember when working for real estate clients is that there are three different buyer personas, and so when creating any form of content, you want to know exactly whom you are addressing each time.
For instance, while you can create the same content type for sellers, buyers, or agents- each group requires a different approach to topics and even the tone to be used.
Sellers: Let’s say you’re designing an email campaign/sequence for a seller – then you would make sure to share compelling content about how much money they could make from selling their home as well as research data supporting this claim. Your funnels should also address how easy it is to list their property on your client’s site.
Buyers: If instead, you were creating a social media ad campaign focused on buyers, then the content would be about how much value they could get from buying a home or what kind of neighborhoods their dream house is located in. You might also share articles that talk about new laws and regulations that are beneficial to them and research data supporting this claim, which can include information such as mortgage rates being at an all-time low!
Agents: If, on the other hand, you’re tasked with creating blog posts targeted at real estate agents, then you have to keep in mind that agents want to sell more houses, streamline their processes and satisfy their own clients. Essentially, they want information that will help make their life easier without getting bogged down in tedious tasks or any unwanted obligations.
Thus, you can blog on topics that interest them like:
- how to market houses using social media,
- how to get more clients in a short amount of time,
- how to stage home-viewing without burning a budget,
- how to conduct virtual home tours,
- how to make use of technology for transactions, etc.
The key thing here is that the content that you create for your clients has to be reflective of and useful to the customer persona that you’re targeting.
Conclusion
The truth is, becoming a Real Estate virtual assistant can be a lucrative venture for anyone who loves working in this space, but to be successful, you have to commit to excellence. Put your clients first. Think about how you can better help them to grow their business. If they are profitable, then you’re as well.
