Do What You Do Best, Outsource The Rest

The title is kind of a cliché in business, but there is a reason expressions become clichés. Many times they ring true for people.

Real estate investors have a ton of tasks to complete to operate a successful business. From prospecting for leads, making offers and setting up purchase paperwork to dealing with contractors, rental management and selling, it seems like a lot more than most people can handle.

Even if you can handle doing all these jobs yourself, do you want to be doing all of them? Let’s face it – prospecting for leads through cold calling, or talking to people who respond to your advertising, is not everyone’s cup of tea.

You are probably very busy. When leads call it may be difficult to answer your phone. The competition for leads is fierce and one might slip away if you cannot respond right away.

According to the National Association of Realtors

The average consumer searches for homes on the Internet for 10 to 14 days before contacting a real estate professional.
66% percent of people select the agent who contacts them first.
When an agent responds to a lead within five minutes, the chances of conversion increase by 100 times.
On average, agents respond to leads 1.3 times and make the first contact in 15.3 hours.
43% percent of leads never get a response.
44% percent of salespeople give up after 1 follow up.
80% percent of sales are done after the 5th to 12th follow up.

Although these stats are for Realtors, they could apply equally to investors. But that means a lot of work. Not only do you have to prospect for the leads… you also have to follow up regularly to be really effective.

How to Just Talk to the ‘Hot Leads’ and Forget the Cold Ones

What if you could spend your time just talking to the leads who are motivated to sell – the ‘Hot’ ones? Think you could spend more time on the more profitable parts of your business?

Maybe it’s time to hire a virtual assistant (VA)? Many investors, and entrepreneurs in general, have really ramped up their business by hiring a virtual assistant. When entrepreneurs have outsourced the tasks that someone making a lot less can do, they have been able to make a lot more money and free up a lot more time for themselves. Aren’t those the real goals of entrepreneurship anyway?

You’ve probably read a bunch of lessons right here on Real Estate Mogul on the benefits of having a VA…

We’ve found two services that find virtual assistants specifically for the real estate industry. Although many of the assistants might expect to work for Realtors, they can easily be adapted for real estate investors as well.

Both services hire virtual assistants in the Philippines. They chose the Philippines for several reasons:

There is a strong work ethic in their culture
Filipino people are not very entrepreneurial – which means they won’t learn your business then run off and do it themselves
People are taught English in school from an early age and can sound like native speakers
It’s hard to find a job in the Philippines, and jobs with foreigners tend to be more secure

Forget the Training – Dive Right in

Just going to an outsourcing website like Odesk or Elance and hiring someone overseas means you will often have to train them to perform many tasks related to real estate.

outdesk You will also probably hire a freelancer on those sites. Someone who will work on a project for you, and then move on to another customer. Trouble is, freelancers make money by taking on as many customers as possible. They will often spread themselves too thin and not do a quality job for you.

Instead of hiring a freelancer to do a project for you here and there, why not hire someone from the Philippines who specializes in real estate? Maybe one that will work for only you and do it on a full-time basis?

We found two companies that specialize in providing virtual assistants who are trained in real estate. The first one is ‘My Out Desk.’ They offer two levels of VA’s:

For $8.60 an hour, you can have an ‘Advanced Real Estate Virtual Assistant’ to do a variety of tasks such as website maintenance, managing emails/phone calls from motivated sellers or buyers, social media, SEO, etc.
For $9.60 an hour you can have an ‘Executive Real Estate Virtual Assistant.’ They are the same as the Advanced VA, but they have more experience to the culture and business practices of the U.S. Only the best VA’s are given this level, and they can run most of your investment practices.

You can hire the Advanced VA by the hour or the Executive full-time for $1,536/month, based on 40 hour work weeks.

How much could you get done if you had an extra 160 hours per month? That’s what a VA can give you.

Find Your Pick of the Litter

The other site we found is ‘Replace Myself.’ The site was started by an entrepreneur who had a lot of success hiring VAs from the Philippines to run his business. Not only does he help you find VAs to use for your business, but he also provides a lot of instruction on how to maximize the value of your VAs.

The site is really geared toward hiring a VA full-time, and they show how you can pay that VA rates as low as $1.58/hour. You can see how Replace Myself works here.

replace There is even a part of his site that is geared toward VA’s for Realtors, which can easily be adapted to real estate investors.

You can sign up for the training for as low as $97/month or a one-time payment of $997. That $97/month includes a free membership to Online Jobs.ph, which is sort of a members-only Craigslist for Filipino VAs.

Investors can easily become overwhelmed with tasks. So find the tasks that make the most amount of money, and outsource the rest to virtual assistants, if you haven’t found a way to automate or eliminate them first!