8 Reasons for Agents to Hire a Real Estate Assistant
Kaylee specializes in real estate, B2B, and SaaS companies. You can find her expertise in sales and real estate content on Fit Small Business.
This article is part of a larger series on How to Become a Real Estate Agent.
Hiring a real estate assistant can be the catalyst you need to grow your real estate business. Consider hiring one if you are closing around two to four properties per month or when your business is expanding quicker than you can handle on your own. Your real estate assistant can maintain your advertising and marketing efforts, schedule appointments, execute lead generation plans, and more to help to scale your real estate business and leave you more time to focus on your craft.
Here are eight reasons why hiring an assistant increases your potential for success in real estate:
1. Appointment Scheduling & Calendar Management
Setting appointments consistently is a huge part of what makes a real estate agent successful. Your calendar should be filled with appointments for everything from potential buyer and seller leads, home showings, and closings to networking events, referral partnerships, and more. With what could be hundreds of appointments, managing your calendar can become a time-consuming but extremely necessary task.
One of the first tasks to give your real estate assistant is managing your calendar. They can make sure there are no double-booked or overlapping appointments, confirm appointments with client reminders to avoid no-shows, follow-up after appointments, and make sure your schedule includes breaks and accounts for time off. This frees up time and energy you can spend on converting leads, serving active clients, and ultimately making more sales.
Calendly scheduling interface
Use Calendly to streamline appointment setting. Calendly allows your real estate assistant to customize your availability based on your preferred schedule. Plus, it offers third-party integrations like Zoom and Google Hangouts to automatically send leads links to online meeting rooms and customer relationship management (CRM) software like HubSpot and Pipedrive for follow-ups.
2. Reaching Niche Markets
Choosing a real estate niche is an effective way to stand out from a sea of real estate professionals and separate yourself from the competition. With a real estate assistant and the right tools, you’re able to free up a significant amount of time and streamline the process of narrowing your niche and marketing strategy. Your assistant can help you enter niche markets by creating marketing and advertising materials, searching for expired listings, setting up lead generation campaigns, and more.
Choose between a large niche like real estate buyers, or specialize in a more specific field like first-time homebuyers, buyers who are investors, empty nesters, or home-flippers. Depending on what niche you choose, you can select the most effective tools for generating targeted leads.
For example, Offrs uses artificial intelligence (AI) to predict listing leads before they even start looking for an agent. To efficiently target real estate seller leads, ask your assistant to set up your Offrs profile, manage incoming leads, and track them in your CRM. Instead of spending hours away from your clients at your desk, you’ll be able to immediately start finding and building connections with the most qualified leads.
For other niches like expired listings, for sale by owner (FSBOs), landlords, or foreclosures, REDX is the tool you need. REDX uses verified data to send you contact information for new leads in your niche every single day. You’ll be able to reach a targeted audience weeks before your competition can find them. Your real estate assistant can create a profile and configure settings on REDX to begin generating targeted, high-quality leads and employ marketing campaigns to target your niche. Get $150 off when you sign up today!
3. Implementing Your Marketing Plan
Real estate marketing includes an almost endless list of routine tasks and methods of reaching people to build your business. Some of the most common real estate prospecting channels are social media, advertising on Facebook and Google, video marketing on YouTube, using a paid lead source like Market Leader, building an IDX website, search engine optimization (SEO) of your online website and real estate landing pages, and sending direct mail.
You may have already established a real estate marketing plan and have been creating all marketing materials on your own. Once you’re able to hire a real estate assistant, review your marketing strategies with them and immediately have them take charge of many tasks. For example, your real estate assistant can manage most aspects of your social media and email marketing efforts, update website and landing pages, create direct mail campaigns, design flyers and other marketing collateral, and many other marketing tasks.
Example mailer from ProspectsPLUS!
Direct mail is a popular, effective way to market your real estate brand and generate leads. ProspectsPLUS! offers the largest variety of direct mail styles and content. Your real estate assistant can use it to create direct mail specific to your audience or niche using premade templates or your own design. All you need to do is give the final stamp of approval, and ProspectsPLUS! makes it easy for your assistant to order postcards, brochures for your listings, or even schedule marketing mailers to go out on an on-going basis.
4. Executing Your Lead Generation Plan
Market Leader interface
In order to scale your business and generate real estate leads, you need a strategy and the ability to implement it. Even if you have a powerful and effective strategy to get leads, you won’t make a dent in your business if you aren’t able to fully and consistently implement lead generation tactics and follow through. With a real estate assistant and the right lead generation tool, you can obliterate this obstacle.
Your real estate assistant can start managing the lead generation tools you currently use to manually track leads. They can identify and even reach out personally to leads who have stopped responding to messages or to those most likely to convert into clients. They can also answer emails, texts, phone calls, and even create new sales funnels for specific types of clients.
With a few exceptions, like phone calls, most lead generation tasks can be automated by lead generation companies. With a done-for-you lead generation tool like Market Leader, you can automatically start raking in leads and following up consistently. Unlike many of its competitors, Market Leader provides exclusive leads as well as ad management, landing pages, and email marketing, so you don’t have to compete with other agents for the same clients.
5. Managing Your Sales Pipeline With a CRM
Even with a complete marketing and lead generation plan, getting real estate clients doesn’t happen without continuous effort. And after investing so much time, money, and energy in lead generation, you won’t want any potential client to be accidentally missed or forgotten. As new leads start pouring in, use real estate CRM software to track and organize leads and automate marketing activities to move them to the next stage of the buying cycle.
If you don’t take the time and effort to go into your pipeline and look at your prospects’ records and activities, determine priorities, and make contact, you will end up missing qualified leads and leave money on the table. Leveraging some of your real estate assistant’s time for pipeline management in your CRM on a daily basis will keep you on top of client activity and help you gauge the effectiveness of lead generating and nurturing strategies.
Visual pipeline from Pipedrive
To make these tasks easier and more effective, use a CRM with a visual pipeline, like Pipedrive. Visualization makes it easy to see where each lead is in your sales funnel at a glance and to identify the highest priorities. Pipedrive even has an activity-focus, so it prompts you to schedule calls, emails, and meetings. Your real estate assistant can complete these tasks as Pipedrive prompts them, which can double your productivity and free you up to focus on ready-to-convert leads.
6. Maintaining Advertising Efforts
Few marketing tactics rival the power of online real estate advertising to attract highly targeted, qualified leads when you need them. However, learning how to run digital ads on even one platform requires a substantial amount of time and presents a huge learning curve. When you’re hiring a real estate assistant as part of building a real estate team, advertising-related tasks should be a huge consideration.
Depending on your requirements and your real estate assistant’s interests and expertise, they could handle all aspects of advertising your real estate business. Alternatively, you can be more involved with managing the process and assign specific tasks to your assistant, such as testing ads with two different audiences, writing two different sets of ad copy (known as A/B testing), finding or creating graphics for ads, or changing the schedule for when ads run.
Set your real estate assistant up for success with a solution to learn how to run ads and establish a digital presence step-by-step by taking advantage of the expertise of professionals at Artur’In. Artur’In is a digital marketing company for real estate professionals that offers ad creation, ad management, and presence management.
Creating a real estate ad with Artur’In
Another online advertising tactic is to become a Zillow Premier Agent (ZPA). As a ZPA, you get prominent placement on unclaimed listings, exclusive placement on your own listings, and can even take advantage of the free CRM. It’s a great way to generate leads who are actively searching for an agent. Your real estate assistant can not only reach out to new leads with next steps but also manage your ZPA account and budget to maximize the number of incoming leads generated.
7. Nurturing Past Clients
Previous clients are one of the most valuable sources of business growth through real estate referrals. Therefore, you need a plan to continually follow up with former clients and stay top-of-mind through personal connections like phone calls, emails, and occasional methods like holiday cards and pop-by gifts.
However, sending holiday cards or gifts to all of your previous clients is a time and labor-intensive undertaking, especially if you don’t have a real estate assistant or a team. Task your assistant to find the right cards, handwrite notes, add the addresses and stamps, and get them all in the mail.
One of the most important real estate team building tips is to set your team members up for success. When you hire a real estate assistant, make sure they’re able to easily view past interactions and have the tools and resources they need to be ready to follow up at the right times.
Top Producer lead flow strategies
Your lead nurturing strategies and marketing messages for potential clients will be different from those for previous clients, so your real estate assistant will need to create multiple funnels and follow-up strategies. The good news is that the Top Producer CRM was built for this exact problem. It tracks all your communications with contacts and provides insights, so you can get data to continually improve your follow-up workflows.
8. Monitoring Reporting & Analytics
To get the absolute best results from any business growth endeavors, you need to track and analyze relevant data and then continually change and develop strategies based on effectiveness. Examples of this kind of data include things like how many impressions your ads or social media posts received, the number of website or landing page visitors, the number of conversions for any given tactic, email and text open rates, and ultimately how many audience members are becoming clients.
With this data readily available, you can make more accurate conclusions and increase your lead generation and conversion opportunities. Once your assistant has a handle on your CRM and the data that needs to be tracked, they can create reports, regularly send you updates, and implement changes to various strategies accordingly.
Interactive report and analytics dashboard from Pipedrive
Choosing a real estate CRM like Pipedrive makes this easy by providing extensive analytics and reporting data in an easy-to-use dashboard that can be managed by your assistant. Allowing your real estate assistant to evaluate the data, identify opportunities for improvements, and make needed adjustments enables you to get the insights and results you need without spending hours away from your clients.
Bottom Line
Hiring a real estate assistant is an efficient way to outsource many tasks, especially those which are routine or not directly related to business growth―yet only 14% of real estate agents have assistants. Take the leap and hire an assistant to manage tasks like follow-ups, email and social media marketing, online advertising, pipeline management, and data tracking. There are so many reasons to hire and ways to use the skills of your assistant, and you can set them up for success by providing them with the right systems and tools.
