Being a successful owner of a real estate business isn’t about doing everything yourself. In fact, focusing on your core business and strengths while delegating the rest is a good strategy, especially for property management. The critical question you need to ask yourself is, do virtual real estate agents help find rentals?
Tasks Virtual Rental Real Estate Agents Perform
The best way to answer that question is to talk about the tasks that virtual rental real estate agents perform.
Respond to Tenant Requests and Showings
Responding to tenant requests can take a lot of time away from other tasks, such as finding additional properties to manage. Yet, keeping tenants happy is critical to preventing turnover. You can protect your own time and keep tenants happy by delegating the task of responding to tenant requests to a virtual rental real estate agent. They can adeptly handle the task of scheduling maintenance and repairs with the contractor and tenant.
Virtual agents can also schedule showings with prospective tenants so that all your in-house team needs to do is show the property. If prospective tenants are happy, your reputation will grow.
Market the Property
Property owners want their properties to be managed by agencies that market aggressively and maintain properties to grow their value.
A virtual real estate agent can also handle many marketing, advertising, and listing tasks that attract property owners seeking a management firm and tenants. The virtual agent can design an easy-to-use SEO website and effective advertisements. These specialists have the expertise to create engaging property listings, which may involve taking photos. They list the properties on various websites to attract potential renters and create ads that are appealing to property owners looking for a management company. Additionally, they can craft social media posts and website blogs that highlight available rental properties. The virtual agent can also monitor the website, social media, emails, and telephone so that all inquiries and leads are handled promptly.
Lead Generation
A virtual rental real estate agent can research properties that would make good rentals and may be coming on the market soon. They can also research companies or individuals who own a lot of real estate and are seeking a top-quality agency to help them rent their property. They can work with contractors to determine how much you’d need to invest in renovations to make a property viable.
Become a Central Point of Contact
An effective virtual real estate agent for rentals can serve as a key point of contact. They are the initial point of contact for potential tenants seeking to rent or vacate a property and for maintenance requests. They streamline processes and handle all front-line duties, only referring more complex or tenant-facing tasks.
But, Do They Actually Help You Find Rentals?
The answer is yes. Engaging an agent to help you handle marketing, lead generation, and tenant requests can help you find rentals for several reasons.
- Happy tenants will recommend your property to their colleagues and friends. As you grow a reputation in the community, not only will you keep properties rented and profitable for your current customers, you’ll gain visibility with potential new customers.
- In the competitive property management world, current and effective digital marketing is critical. Owners have many tasks and may be unable to write blogs and advertisements quickly and well. However, without these recent blogs and advertisements, rentals will sag. A virtual rental real estate agent can take up the slack.
- Freeing up time for in-person agents to accomplish customer-facing tasks can boost rentals. Networking, making in-person contacts, and finding new properties to manage, require significant time. Once a real estate agency owner delegates some of the day-to-day management and marketing tasks, in-person agents can spend more time finding properties to list.
Why Can’t an In-person Real Estate Agent Do Just As Well?
An in-person real estate agent can certainly do all the tasks you could delegate to a virtual agent. However, you won’t get the same value for your money. You don’t have the overhead with a virtual agent as you do with an in-person one. If the virtual agent is located in a country with low labor costs, you’ll also pay less in wages. Delegating as many tasks as possible to a virtual assistant makes financial sense.
Also, virtual agents are often specifically trained in digital skills such as SEO and blog writing, while an in-person agent tends to thrive on doing deals in person. With a virtual real estate agent, you’ll be able to have each agent do those tasks where they excel and enjoy themselves.
ShoreAgents provides offshore staffing solutions for real estate businesses. We can find potential virtual real estate agents for your team and present them to you to interview. We also provide training, so you can be confident the agent you hire will be a peak performer. Best of all, our agents are located in the Philippines, so you’ll receive great value for your money. Contact us today to see how we can help you grow your business.