Posts Tagged ‘Virtual Assistants’
Diary of a Virtual Assistant
Friday, January 28th, 2011
We often get wrapped up in our own world and assume that everybody knows what we know and sees what we see. Your job as a real estate agent is second nature to you. You use terms such as MLS and REO on a regular basis and assume that everybody else knows what you are talking about. More than often though, they don’t. That’s why they trust you with their homes and not themselves.
I often speak to you in this blog and assume that you know exactly how my company works. Instead of assuming you know what a real estate marketing company does, I am going to give you a little insight into what goes on in the inner workings of our office.
For those of you who don’t have experience working with a marketing team, I may open your eyes to new ideas and possibilities. For those of you who value your real estate marketing, I may get your mind rolling in a new direction. Let’s follow my team of VA’s through the day!
8:30 am
Our team arrives, ready to start the day. First thing she does is check her task system. The task system is RealSupport’s way of keeping track of all of the projects and assignments we get from our clients. Some are re-occurring every week (i.e. re-posting Craigslist ads, sending out Seller Reports), while others are big scale projects (Write 4 Keyword-Rich Community Pages for San Francisco Client).
9:00 am
Email check-ups. Periodically throughout the day we get responses from projects we’ve have been working on, but also inquiries of all shapes and sizes.
“What do you think about this Tweetlister thing? Do I need to check this out? Can I link it to my Facebook?”
“I love the Bio you wrote for my website! Where else can I put this???”
“I changed companies this week. Can you update my info on all my sites?”
We proceed to respond to each e-mail, sometimes forwarding them on to a person most appropriate to answer. You see, each team member has their own area of expertise…
Sarah is our resident real estate Social Media guru. When it comes to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or any of the other millions of sites, she is your girl. On a daily basis, she tweets interesting information, creates new Facebook Business pages, or figures out how to seamlessly feed one social networking site to the next. Her list grows on a daily basis because there is always something new and exciting that one of our clients “have to have.”
Brandie is our design girl. If a client wants a new logo, a custom header, a postcard design, brochure design, etc. – the task goes to her or a freelance designer, depending on our workload. As you know, esthetics are very important for a real estate agent. No marketing team could survive without a design specialist.
Have you ever found a new site that you want to use, but don’t have the patience to figure it out? Guess what? We have somebody for that too. When it comes to troubleshooting and processes, Ron is your man. When one of our Connecticut clients decided to try QR codes, Ron found a user-friendly website, drafted up a fool-proof checklist, and created a QR code for every listing our client had on the market.
We have another girl, Allie, who has the incredible ability to be in multiple places at once – Evanston IL, Half Moon Bay CA, Lexington MA, Andover MA, and the Big Island of Hawaii, to name a few. No, she doesn’t actually travel to these places. She blogs about them. She has made it her niche to get to know everything about a client’s community so she can speak on their behalf, once a week, on their blogs. She spends her day Googling, reading articles sent from clients (“Blog Food”), and scouring real estate tips to provide our clients with well written, keyword-dense, blog masterpieces.
For all of our statistic-minded clients who like a little less fluff and a little more fact, they go to Lori. With a real estate background and a love for numbers, market statistics was a natural choice for Lori. With years of experience as a virtual assistant, she also has every process down to a science. From foreclosure procedures to the often complicated process of MLS entry, Lori is your girl.
12:00 pm
Lunch Time! A homemade wrap and a much-needed coffee in the lounge. Real estate marketing takes a lot out of you!
1:00 pm
The phone rings (for probably the 100th time that day). It’s from a client we hadn’t heard from in awhile. After going through a lull with her business, it’s back and booming and she’s ready to jump right back on that marketing bandwagon. She wants the full service treatment – listing marketing, blogging, and, of course, a Facebook Business Page. Lori forwards the call straight to Erica. As the Operations Manager, Erica knows everything there is to know about our business and real estate marketing. She gives her the rundown on what she needs to do to get started again. She quickly pulls up her files and finds it will be easy to jump in where we left off.
3:00 pm
A handful of new e-mails arrive to our team account. One is “blog food” from a Maryland client. It’s a news article on living green. It goes to Allie, of course, for blogging material, but also to Sarah so she can use a tidbit from the article to post to the client’s Facebook wall and Tweet to her Twitter. Another is from our Northern Virginia client. It’s her latest market statistics. That goes straight to Ron for seller reporting. He will gather the information together and place it in a well-presented email to send to each seller that client currently has listed.
4:00 pm
Stacey has a kick-off call with our Florida client about his drip campaign. He has sent her a few different ideas that include interesting and unknown facts about golf. Why golf? Because his niche is Golf Communities in Florida and he wants his clients to know that he knows his stuff when it comes to golf. Stacey jots down notes, and takes inventory of the free drip campaign that already comes with his Point2 account, and she begins to tweak each email to make it personal to our client. By the way, Stacey is one of our real estate copywriters. She writes “About Me” pages, Community pages, Drip Campaigns, descriptive ad copy, Newspaper Ads, Tag Lines, and, of course, blogs!
I hope this was helpful in opening your eyes to our world. If you want to become a part of it, all you have to do is give us a call. When it comes to real estate marketing, there really is nothing we don’t do.
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Earn More, Work Less & Enjoy Life
Saturday, July 24th, 2010After you have been selling real estate for awhile, chances are you have become reasonably adept at generating and closing leads. Striving to improve these skills will incrementally improve your business for sure. However, here is the one thing you can do that will result in a quantum leap in your bottom line and give you more free time to enjoy it…
Job vs. Business
First of all, you can’t possibly have a massive improvement to your business if you don’t have a business. The vast majority of real estate sales professionals have a “job” they work for rather than a business that serves them. It’s a huge distinction that is lost on even some of the industry’s top producers. It doesn’t matter how much money you make, it is how it’s made that matters.
As the figure below shows, there are only three things to consider for any business (whether it’s real estate sales, manufacturing widgets or building skyscrapers) Lead Generation, Lead Conversion and Business Support. These are known as the three phases of the business cycle, and every successful business follows them.
How you handle each of these phases will determine the extent of your business success. For the sake of this article we are going to assume that your core competencies of Lead Generation and Conversion are well handled. Our focus instead will be the Business Support phase of the cycle. The way most agents handle Business Support literally guarantees they become mired in the job of selling real estate, rather than having the benefit of a business doing the heavy lifting for them.
The Three Most Expensive Ways to Get Things Done
The biggest factor that holds sales associates back from truly having a business that serves them, is how they handle all of the myriad details that need to be done outside of their selling activities. Here are the three most expensive mistakes most agents make when dealing with these issues (listed in order of most expensive on down):
- Not Do It At All – in their well-intentioned attempts to do everything themselves, they become so overwhelmed that the detailed items start falling through the cracks and their lead generation / closing activities suffer.
- Do It Themselves – one of the biggest limiting beliefs in real estate sales is that if you want to have “total control” and have things done right, you have to do it yourself. Just for laughs, tell that to the CEO of any successful company and see their reaction. Remember, any time you do something outside of your core-competency, you end up paying top dollar for amateur results.
- Hire an Onsite Assistant – this may actually work if you are naturally gifted manager and motivator of people (which the most salespeople are not). However, you are still paying way too much for what you need done.
There is a fourth way however, that allows you to focus on what you do best, brings in the most money and costs you the least. It is the way I’ve run my businesses for the last 15 years and have taught 10s of thousands of REALTORS to transform their business…
Virtual Outsourcing – Business Support On Call
Imagine being able to hire talent to accomplish nearly anything you need done, that you don’t have to train, motivate, provide office space, equipment or benefits, and you only pay for what you use. That is the payoff of using virtual assistants and consultants. It is the only way I’ve found that is accessible to every real estate sales person of any experience level that truly addresses the Business Support phase of their business cycle in a practical and profitable way.
Keep in mind however that working with virtual assistants and consultants is not at all like working with a traditional onsite assistant. In fact, if you treat them that way it is almost guaranteed to fail. The process of finding, evaluating, hiring and working profitably with virtual assistants and consultants can be a bit involved. So to avoid the inevitable overwhelm that would result from my attempting to insert all that material here, I’ve created a separate PDF download for you that covers the following topics in great detail:
- On-Site Assistants vs. Virtual Assistants
- Ways Virtual Assistants Can Support Your Success
- How To Find And Hire The Right VA For You
- Five Critical VA Interview Questions
To download this free document, just go to www.Facebook.com/OnlineDominance and click the “Cool Tools” tab at the top of the page. There you will find a number of free resources including the special report “ePRODUCTIVITY – Earn More, Work Less & Enjoy Life!“.
Case Studies
Here are just a few examples of REALTORS who have incorporated Virtual Outsourcing into their business and never looked back:
- Dave Fletcher, The Fletcher Group – uses a virtual transaction coordinator to handle the many 10s of millions of dollar closing each year. Here’s the best part, she only charges Dave if the deal closes!
- Chris Coveny, Royal LePage Performance Realty – found a skilled virtual writer to research and post on his blog for a fraction of what his time is worth.
- Roman Pavlik, Pavlik Luxury Real Estate – found several VAs to keep his listings up to date on his Website on a daily basis.
- Sven Andersen, The Andersen Team – uses a team of VAs to handle every aspect of his listing marketing coordination, which of course frees him up to bring in as many new listings he wants without breaking a sweat.
It is no accident that all of the above (and many, many others) have a business that serves them, instead of being a slave to a job. If you truly want to have a business where you can earn more, work less and enjoy life you need to focus on what you do best and outsource the rest. Virtual Outsourcing (i.e. using virtual assistants and consultants) is the most viable and affordable way to accomplish this available to all REALTORS of any skill and experience level.
NOTE: Mr. Internet®, RUSSER Communications, its staff and officers receive no compensation whatsoever from any third party vendors (unless he/they are directly involved with the creation and/or improvement of a vendor service or product), and make no recommendations as to the suitability of the products or services mentioned in this article. Always thoroughly investigate any product or service before trying or purchasing.
Mr. Internet is the alter-ego of Michael J. Russer, an internationally recognized Internet speaker, trainer, author, and strategic consultant to the real estate industry. He’s dedicated to helping real estate professionals leverage their people skills into profit on the Internet. Send your Internet questions to help@askmrinternet.com or you can visit his Website at http://www.russer.com
This article is reprinted in its entirety from the July 2010 issue of REALTOR® Magazine by permission of the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS®. Copyright © 2010. All Rights Reserved other than mentioned above. Mr. Internet® is a registered trademark of RUSSER Communications.
