Managing a real estate investment business requires you to wear a lot of different hats. And, let’s face it, hiring full-time—or even part-time—help, can be prohibitively expensive.
Fortunately, there’s a way for you to get the help you need without going over budget.
Hiring a virtual assistant is affordable, since many of the people who work as VAs are overseas in places like the Philippines. It’s also easy, with many potential assistants available and ready to work.
The issue that some people have with hiring a virtual assistant is that they’re not sure which tasks and assignments to outsource. Here are the top things to outsource if you can:
#1: Market Research
The first thing to consider outsourcing is market research. Seeking out potential properties to buy and researching markets can be incredibly time-consuming.
This particular task is a good candidate for a virtual assistant because it’s not complicated. It’s easy to teach someone how to do it, and having a reliable person to do it for you can save you both time and money.
#2: Website Updates
The next thing to outsource is updates to be made to your website. Some virtual assistants have experience with such things—and that’s especially true if your website is a WordPress site.
You might have new properties to add to your website. If you have already taken pictures and written the content to list on your site, you can outsource the updating process to a trusted virtual assistant.
Of course, it’s also an option—if you have a VA who can write well—to pay the VA to write the content for your site too. That’s a two-birds-with-one-stone approach that’s very efficient.
#3: Images for Blog Posts
If you’ve ever fallen into the rabbit hole of searching for blog images, you know what a time-waster it can be. Finding the right images is essential, and yet it’s also the kind of thing that takes up a great deal of valuable time.
The solution is to outsource the task of finding images to a virtual assistant. You can task them with finding royalty free images. Or, alternatively, you can provide them with your password to a paid photo site like Deposit Photos and have them search for photos there.
#4: Video Editing
Not every virtual assistant is suited for every task, but if you find one who has some video editing skills then it makes a lot of sense to outsource this particular task.
The reason is that video editing is time-consuming to do and thus probably not the best use of your time.
The good news is that even a VA with no video editing experience may be able to do simple tasks like adding a video transcript or putting in a clickable call to action. The basic tools that YouTube makes available mean that they won’t even need video editing software to do it.
Of course, your job is to make sure that you keep a copy of the raw video and make sure that you communicate what you want clearly to eliminate confusion and wasted time.
#5: Social Media Posting
If you’re going to use social media to promote your business, then you need to maintain an active presence there. One of the best ways to do that is to outsource the process to a VA.
You can ask a VA to:
- Write original social media posts, including copy to go with photographs and videos
- Curate content from relevant resources to share with your followers
- Schedule social media posts for the future
- Respond to followers’ comments and questions
All of these things take time. You can maximize your profits by outsourcing them to someone else.
#6: Programming
Finally, if you have programming to be done—whether it’s an update to your website or the creation of an app—it’s a good idea to outsource it to a VA who has programming experience.
Again, this probably isn’t a task for a VA who you hire to do clerical tasks. However, there’s no rule that says that you need to hire only one VA. If you can find someone who has some programming experience, it’s probably going to be far less expensive than hiring a programmer here.
As long as you convey your expectations clearly and set up a system to follow up, then you can trust a skilled VA to handle your programming needs.
Conclusion
The bottom line is that hiring one or more virtual assistants can free you up to do more important things. If you want to maximize your profits, you can’t afford to waste your time doing busy work. Let a VA handle those things for you—so you can spend more time seeing your projects through to completion.