Cash Flow Friday Tip #9: Fast Track the growth of your RE business by hiring a VA

In this week's Cash Flow Friday tip I'd like to talk about using VA's or virtual assistants to help grow your real estate business by allowing you to delegate the busy work so you can focus on the money making activities. Throughout the past 5 years I've employed VA's both in a full-time capacity as well as freelance work and my experience overall has been fantastic. In addition to my real estate business I own a ecommerce company where I've employed the same 3 VA's full-time for over 4 years now and it's been a  wonderful relationship. These 3 VA's consist of a graphic designer, web developer, and SEO specialist and all are college educated and very good at what they do. I believe the highest paid person on that team is my web developer and she makes $550 per month (40 hours per week) which breaks down to approx $3.44 per hour and she is super happy.

I n my real estate business we have used numerous VA's throughout the years to handle mundane tasks such as data collection, cold calling, list building, appointment setting, email follow up, etc and as of today we have one girl who's been working with us for the past few months on numerous projects and she works approx 25-30 hours per week. She is working on more specific tasks like researching banks and who currently hold distressed Multi-Family notes and tracking down the inside contacts or asset managers so we can build relationships with them. She's assisting me with a few of my podcast projects that I am working on and I'll probably add a few duties to her list shortly. She's very organized and is extremely efficient and guess what, she only charges $2.93 an hour. For her same qualities here in the US I'd have to pay $12-15 per hour if not more

Here are some of the other things I've used VA's for in the past. Oh, and just so you know, all of my VA's are based in the Philippines

·         Building a brokers email list by calling all listings on Loopnet for MHP's and requesting the marketing package and asking for the brokers email which we then added to a database

·         Researching phone numbers for property owners although now we use TLO.com which eliminates the need to hire a VA for this research

•    website design
•    admin assistant
•    pull mailing lists
•    Creating excel databases
•     logo design
•    SEO
•     content writing
•    social media management

One thing that I can't stress enough is your VA or employee is only as good as your training is. What I mean by that is you can't expect to hire an assistant and have her become an expert in your business overnight and so it is your duty as his/her boss to create very detailed training programs for each task you want completed. For instance, I have my VA help with booking guests for my podcast and I rely on her to find, contact, schedule, and follow up with prospective guests for our show, but she had no clue about my business or what my perfect guest looked like and so I had to create a thorough training program with examples, videos, resources, email templates, follow procedures, etc to help her become competent in this particular task. So just keep in mind when you hire a VA that if the worker isn't meeting your expectations then you need to first take a deep look at yourself and determine whether or not you provided all of the necessary tools and training to ensure this VA's success with the task at hand. Most of the problems are a result of the boss providing little or no direction and then blaming the VA when he/she didn't perform.

 

The best resource to date where I find my VA's is odesk.com but there are also many others including elance.com, freelancer.com, guru.com and I'm sure many others. I've used elance for hiring technical writers and programmers but haven't found it that useful for lower cost admin type jobs.

Recommended Resources

 

·         Download my free success guide,  “7 habits of highly successful multi-family investors” by going to www.KevinBupp.com/guide

·         Schedule a free "no obligation" call directly with Kevin by clicking this link https://www.timetrade.com/book/KV2D2

 

·         Looking to invest in Mobile Home Parks? Want to partner with the industry experts? Check out http://www.SunriseCapitalInvestors.com