When running a real estate business, you want everything to run smoothly, including building a solid working relationship with your hired virtual assistants.
The whole point of hiring a property management virtual assistant is to take the pressure off yourself and your in-house staff.
You want to ensure your real estate virtual assistant, important clients, and other team members are handled smoothly.
In this article, we provide you with five vital things to consider to ensure you manage your real estate virtual assistants in the best possible way.
1 – Preparing To Work With A Real Estate Virtual Assistant
Before starting the real estate virtual assistant hiring process, you must identify the tasks you need to be outsourced.
Make sure you thoroughly evaluate where you need help with your day-to-day tasks and calculate how much time it would save if a virtual assistant did all those time-consuming data entry tasks.
The real estate industry is fast-paced, so you waste time on many administrative tasks.
Once you have correctly set out which tasks you need your hired real estate virtual assistant to do, you must ensure they fully understand what is required.
Hiring a real estate VA to manage social media is only possible when they have knowledge or experience.
Of course, you could train them in that area in the future, but to start with, you must only assign them real estate business tasks they are trained to do.
When you hire a virtual assistant, they must understand the methods of communication you like to use. Establishing a clear understanding from the start will help to avoid misunderstandings and help build a solid working relationship.
2 – Communication With A Real Estate Virtual Assistant
Communication is vital in any business, especially when hiring virtual assistants.
Miscommunication can lead to a loss of revenue for real estate agents; therefore, you must ensure you use the best methods when working with your virtual assistant.
Like any other business, the real estate industry relies heavily on effective collaboration methods between all staff members.
Your virtual assistant must understand how you prefer to communicate within the workplace. For example, for some real estate professionals corresponding with staff via email is acceptable, while others like to use instant messenger software like Slack or Microsoft Teams.
When you hire property management virtual assistants, you should have a weekly Skype call to check everything is going smoothly.
Always ensure that you make it clear to your virtual real estate assistant that they must stick to the methods of communication you have set out. VA bombards you with phone calls or Skyping daily would prove counterproductive.
Weekly check-ins are standard practice in the real estate agent business and work effectively, and it’s best to have these as scheduled regular events.
3 – Tracking Progress And Productivity
When you hire a virtual assistant to look after property management tasks, you must always set and track goals for each job you assign.
Real estate businesses work to strict deadlines to ensure you are on top of what tasks your virtual assistant has completed and the status of the ones they are yet to finish.
For example, suppose your VA is working on lead generation tasks. In that case, knowing how far they have come with implementing social media management marketing tasks that help generate leads is essential.
Real estate companies should always use time-tracking software tools like TimeDoctor to ensure each task within a particular project is monitored correctly.
Using this type of software allows your virtual assistant to understand what is expected of them.
For example, if your virtual assistant was assigned marketing tasks to be completed by a specific date and you can see they are close to the deadline, you can monitor their progress and step in if you foresee a problem.
Performance management and how quickly and effectively they complete their tasks can be part of their key performance indicators (KPIs).
Setting fair key performance indicators from the start makes job evaluation meetings far more accessible to manage due to having all the relevant performance data to guide you.
4 – Providing Feedback And Performance Evaluations
Within the property management industry, providing positive and constructive performance evaluations of all staff members, including virtual assistants, is vital.
Sometimes virtual assistants can feel isolated as offshore team members, so you must make them feel like an essential team member.
Setting KPIs that are fair and easy to follow is vital for evaluating their overall performance and helps the business owner build a happy working environment.
It is vital to be constructive in your feedback, especially if the feedback will be mostly negative.
And it is easy for property management owners to focus too heavily on a virtual assistant’s negative performance without adequately considering the reasons behind the poor performance.
A far more measured approach would be asking how the virtual assistant thinks their performance can be improved and what tools they need to achieve the goals.
Sometimes, poor task performance could be due to personal problems or feeling overwhelmed with stress.
Taking a caring and constructive approach will help real estate virtual assistants open up freely to discuss the issues affecting their performance.
Understanding and placing extra measures that help improve task performance, be it additional software or more time to do each task, helps build trust. In addition, when these measures are implemented, it results in a higher level of performance.
5 – Managing Difficult Situations
Managing difficult situations is part and parcel of running a successful real estate business.
However, property managers often must use a different approach when facing tricky work-related situations.
It is vital to have a grievance pathway where staff know the set protocols for any situation. Having this policy pathway helps both staff and managers to work together effectively.
As a business owner, the last thing you want is to be bombarded by disgruntled staff members because your VA has not been communicating with them properly or there is a personality clash.
In this situation, address these issues promptly before they escalate and harm your business productivity.
Dealing with conflict between staff members is always challenging, so stay professional and take a balanced approach. When staff see you are being professional and fair, they will quickly realise they must apply the same approach.
Being fair to your staff is vital to building a healthy working environment.
For example, if your real estate virtual assistant requires time off and you refuse it without giving a reason, it could harm your working relationship moving forward.
However, if you find out they needed time off to attend their best friend’s wedding but were prepared to work later during the week to make up the missed hours, it shows you are willing to compromise.
It is always best to resolve tricky situations quickly so that you can concentrate on running your successful business. For more info on the ups and downsides of working with a real estate VA, head over and have a read.
Let Us Handle All Your VA Management Requirements
Hiring a real estate virtual assistant is a must to ensure you achieve sustainable growth.
The amount of time you can save delegating all those time-consuming property management services tasks is worth way more than the effort.
When you then consider the cost savings that come with hiring a virtual assistant, it proves that hiring is the way forward.
However, the hiring process can prove tricky, especially if you haven’t done it before. So instead of diving in and hiring the wrong VA, give us a call today for a free consultation.
Our team will source, hire, train and manage the right person to suit your business needs.
