As a real estate owner or manager, you may have your hands full with every effort required to market and maintain properties. Luckily, remote work is increasingly embraced, and real estate professionals don't have to rely only on people to join their onsite team to help with the workload.
You can work with remote team members to take on repetitive or low-level tasks within your real estate company. While virtual assistants work remotely, they can be valuable assets to your company. So, how can you manage a team of remote team members, including VAs for social media management or other roles that don't require a physical presence in your office?
Today we highlight a few key issues managers experience when building remote teams and the ideal solutions to manage them well.
What Is a Real Estate Virtual Assistant?
What is a real estate virtual assistant? VAs are contract workers that live and work remotely. They can handle various administrative, sales, customer support, and marketing duties (among other tasks) to help your real estate company grow.
What Does a Real Estate Virtual Assistant Do?
Here are some tasks real estate VAs can perform for your company:
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is integral to the success of real estate companies. Social platforms can help you funnel more prospects to your website and business.
Skilled virtual assistants can help optimize your social media platforms. They can keep up with trends to market through social platforms while ensuring that the content is up to date. Virtual assistants can also respond to potential customers leaving comments or reaching out through your social accounts.
Website and Content Management
Your website and content need consistent updates to help your business stay visible online. The content should also be search engine optimized to help people find you. Many virtual assistants have SEO skills and can help manage your website.
Schedule Appointments
Scheduling appointments can sometimes get off track quickly, especially if you have a busy schedule. Missing appointments will also come at the cost of lost business. However, real estate company owners can find virtual assistants to handle their calendars and ensure appointments are scheduled and attended to on time.
What Are Some Common Challenges When Managing Remote Teams?
While there are plenty of benefits to adding virtual contractors to your workforce, there are challenges, too. Here are a few things to consider when choosing a platform that helps real estate agents or brokers find VAs and manage them.
Productivity Challenges
Not all remote workers are productive when working outside of an office environment. Working from home can pose many distractions, affecting productivity for VAs.
A lack of productivity from virtual assistants would result in drawbacks for your company. Working through a system that helps you manage tasks, productivity, and find quality VAs to deliver good work is crucial.
Lack of Effective Communication
Communication may be challenging in working with virtual assistance unless you have the right tools to keep in touch. Unclear communication may result in failure to finish work, missing necessary appointments, and generally poor workmanship.
Choose the right tools and platform to keep in frequent contact with virtual contractors.
Cultural and Location Differences
Because virtual assistants can work from anywhere, working in different time zones can become challenging. A virtual assistant may be required to adjust their times accordingly to meet your local office hours and needs.
In addition, cultural differences can lead to differences in holiday schedules or communication. Be sure to outline your expectations for work hours and time off when onboarding a new VA.
Inability to Build Positive Work Relationships
Building meaningful work relationships with a physical team is often easier than with remote team members. Having no in-person contact with virtual assistants means there can be a need for more intentional efforts to connect and get to know VAs outside of work-related tasks. A lack of positive relationships with your VAs can lead to challenges, eventually affecting productivity.
What's the Best Way to Manage Issues for Virtual Assistant Teams?
VAs can become some of your most valuable team members, so it's ideal to find ways to manage challenges and overcome issues to benefit from these skilled workers.
We've touched on a few solutions, but it's important to highlight again that routine communication is paramount to successful VA-company relationships. Schedule frequent meetings to track productivity and simply connect with VAs as part of your team.
In addition, providing ongoing training during onboarding (and ongoing) helps virtual assistants perform their best in their roles.
Finally, choosing a platform like VPM Solutions is the best way to find quality virtual contractors, benefit from the free training offered through the program, and utilize the Company Accounts feature that makes it easy for real estate professionals and others in your company to manage VAs successfully!
Manage Remote Team Members Through VPM Solutions
Your real estate company will benefit from skilled and trained real estate virtual assistants to boost the productivity of your company. VPM Solutions offers in-platform, industry-specific training for virtual assistants, so they are uniquely equipped to work well for your business. Additionally, managing remote team members is simple with Company Accounts!
Ready to start building your VA team? Schedule a demo with VPM Solutions.
