You’re busy. You’re closing new deals every month and working with clients takes up the vast majority of your day. You can no longer dedicate your time to the necessary digital marketing or lead qualification needed to keep your business running.
So, should you hire a real estate assistant?
What to consider when hiring a real estate assistant
Cost
Real estate assistants are often hired as employees, which means labor costs can run thousands of dollars higher than you might have anticipated. Agents are often responsible for payroll taxes, social security taxes, unemployment taxes, and regulatory fees, as well as other optional fiscal responsibilities (benefits, etc.). When factored together, an in-house real estate assistant working full-time at just $12/hr will end up costing agents a minimum of $35,000 a year ($3,000/month) to employ.
Need
What are the primary areas you need help in? Are you looking for someone to answer phones, schedule appointments, and other administrative tasks? Or are you looking for someone to help with your digital marketing and lead qualification? Chances are you won’t be able to hire one assistant to do all your peripheral work effectively, so make sure to prioritize your search according to what you’d like to outsource most.
Skill
Related to the above two points, assistants are often entry-level and as such are not experts in any particular field. That’s fine if you’re primarily looking for help with rote duties like paperwork, data entry, or scheduling. But if you’re looking to offload some of your more crucial responsibilities (lead generation and qualification, marketing, etc.), you’ll more than likely need to spend more to get experienced help.
Availability
Let’s say you’re looking for help with lead qualification. What happens when your assistant can’t get ahold of potential prospects during the typical work week/hours? Do you take over? Forgo non-business hour lead qualification? Or are you willing to pay your assistant to work overtime, nights, and weekends to follow up?
What about a virtual real estate assistant?
As freelancers or independent contractors, virtual real estate assistants offer tremendous flexibility and cost savings over their in-house counterparts. The cheapest virtual real estate assistants available cost bout $5/hour, or about $800 a month for the equivalent full-time work. And with more and more people working fully remote anyway, a virtual real estate assistant seems like a no-brainer, right?
Consider, though:
- Virtual assistants are often low-skilled, and unlike an in-house real estate assistant who you may be able to teach and help advance their career and market knowledge, they’re likely to remain that way.
- The reason virtual assistants are so cheap? They’re more often than not the result of outsourcing to international, low-cost-of-living locations. Again, this is fine if you’re primarily interested in handing over administrative and data entry work. But when it comes to higher-value tasks, issues stemming from language barriers and differing time zones can easily arise.
- Since most agents do not hire virtual assistants for full-time work, many virtual assistants take on multiple clients to fill their days. As a result, there’s no guarantee you’ll get immediate help from an assistant should you need it, and there’s also the possibility that your work will be further subcontracted.
- You still have to factor in the costs of your marketing. Virtual assistants can run your campaigns, but you’ll still need to pay for the ad placement.
A third option?
If you’re considering outsourcing your marketing and lead generation to an assistant, consider Homesnap Concierge instead.
Homesnap Concierge is a fully managed advertising platform and lead qualification service.
Each month, our dedicated and experienced Concierge marketing team will optimize and run your advertising campaigns for an unlimited number of listings on networks like Facebook, Google, and Instagram. We’ll work around the clock to target the most-likely-to-transact leads on those platforms with hyper-targeted and personalized ads and qualify them for you. Then, we’ll send you the qualified, hot leads right away, and continue to nurture the rest until they are ready to convert.
You’ll have full transparency into the process. We’ll share key metrics — number of leads processed, lead contact information, qualification details, all leads acquired, and more — so you can follow us every step of the way. Just watch the leads roll in and get back to what you want to focus on.
All costs, including the costs of advertisements, are included in one, low subscription price. For hundreds of dollars less per month than even the cheapest virtual assistant, you’ll get a dedicated, expert marketing and lead qualification team to help you masterfully run digital campaigns and qualify leads for you.