The intent of this short piece is to give you a snapshot into the Virtual Assistant world! As our team has expanded we’ve added multiple virtual assistants from all over the world. We’ve tried and experimented with websites like upwork.com, fiverr.com and flexjobs.com too. There have been ups and downs but I wanted to cover a few details to consider when you’re thinking about hiring a virtual assistant.
One of the first things we did when considering if we wanted to make a jump into this arena was analyzing what our time was worth. Take a moment and calculate what you make hourly or how your salary breaks down. Take into consideration whether your activity is a $10/hr, $100/hr or $1,000/hr type of activity. We use a table that breaks down a lot of our activities into different groups and dollar amounts and then we hire out the lower level stuff! If you want to see the table we use just send me an e-mail.
Once you’ve identified some of the tasks you don’t want to do anymore you need to build checklists and processes to teach someone so they can be duplicated. For example, building mailing lists, data entry, cold calling, lead follow up, etc… These are all examples of things you can use a virtual assistant for. Some of the websites we mentioned might be a good fit if you’re looking for a one time job or an on-going person. We may use a program like screencast-o-matic for around $10/mo where we can record our computer screen to show them what they need to be doing. We save these videos in the cloud so any assistant can watch them and we don’t have to explain ourselves over and over again.
When choosing an online hiring platform, do some research to see if virtual assistants come pre-trained on an area of real estate or if they need to be trained. We typically pay from $5-6/hr although you can get a pre-trained VA for $8+, it just all depends. We also recommend screening the candidiate with an interview to analyze their personalities, language barriers, and other factors to see if they will be the right fit for that position. Most websites will record the screen of the VA so you can check in periodically to make sure they are staying on task and not doing other work at the same time.
Many of our VA’s are not in the United States so you’ll need to look into ring central, call rail, Skype or other services where they can dial in if their job responsibilities include making phone calls. You can also utilize a system like TeamViewer to log into a desktop here in the US from their computer if they are blocked for any reason from certain browsers or websites.
There is a lot more material to cover on the subject. If you have more questions please e-mail myself or give me a call.
Suggest an upcoming real estate topic or newsletter request to Jeremy.Kloter@OutFastRealty.com.
Jeremy Kloter
COO – Asset Manager – Realtor
C: (813) 610-0015
www.OutFastRealty.com
www.1800OutFast.com
