How to Become a Real Estate Virtual Assistant

A real estate virtual assistant is someone who specializes in serving real estate professionals, such as agents, brokers, and mortgage loan underwriters.

As a real estate VA, your main responsibility will be to streamline your clients’ workflows by handling tasks they assign to you remotely.

With your assistance, your clients can focus on more demanding, specialized work, secure in the knowledge that you’re taking care of the day-to-day maintenance of their businesses.

What does a real estate virtual assistant do?

A real estate virtual assistant’s responsibilities may vary depending on their client’s needs and their own abilities.

For instance, mortgage loan underwriters’ VAs may focus on finance-related duties, whereas real estate agents’ VAs generally have to handle a wider variety of customer-focused tasks, such as marketing, arranging open houses, and listing properties.

Here are some of the most common tasks that real estate virtual assistants handle:

• Administrative support: This can be anything from taking calls and responding to emails to processing paperwork and tracking real estate transactions.
• Customer service: Many real estate VAs help their employers maintain good relationships with their clients. A large part of this duty consists of responding to client inquiries promptly and courteously.
• Marketing: There are several ways you can promote properties for your employers as a VA, including by posting on social media, creating content (e.g., writing blog posts), and via email marketing or online advertising.
• Lead generation: This is the process of identifying prospective buyers, reaching out to them, and gaining their interest in your property.
• Research: Some employers may ask you to conduct market and competitor research and analyze your findings for them. For instance, you might dig into housing market trends in your area or find out what your employer’s competitors are doing to land clients.
• Data entry: In the process of gathering data (such as property conditions, selling prices, and buyer and seller information) for research purposes, you’ll probably have to enter it into spreadsheets or some other digital format.

You don’t need to offer all of the services we just mentioned, but they’re a representative sample of the kind of work that real estate VAs often do.

When determining the services you want to offer, think about which services your ideal clients will need and what tasks you’re confident in doing. If you have a strong background in this or that area, it makes sense to incorporate those skills into your real estate virtual assistance side hustle.

There aren’t any hard requirements (such as earning a specific diploma or certification) that you need to meet to become a real estate virtual assistant. You certainly don’t need to be a licensed realtor yourself.

That said, most real estate virtual assistants have at least a high school diploma or equivalent.

Necessary skills for real estate virtual assistants

More important than earning a particular set of qualifications is ensuring that you have the actual chops to do the job.

In addition to the general must-have skills for virtual assistants, there are also a few skills specific to VAs in the real estate industry that you should acquire:

• Communication skills: Excellent written and verbal communication skills are essential to the job, as you’ll likely have to interact with many different parties, such as your employer, buyers, and sellers. You’ll do this via call, text, and email.
• Organization skills: You must be highly organized to become a virtual assistant of any kind, especially one who handles a lot of administrative tasks and needs to meet multiple deadlines (a certainty in the real estate industry).
• Attention to detail: Real estate virtual assistants prepare a lot of documents, some of which can involve legal matters. It’s important to pay close attention to ensure all the documents you prepare are free of errors.
• Proactivity: Real estate agents already have a lot on their plates. They’ll appreciate it if you can use your own judgment to make certain decisions (rather than needing to pester them for solutions to minor issues).
• Technical skills: Learn how to use relevant tools and software, such as virtual assistant time-tracking tools (e.g., Clockify and Harvest), communication tools (Zoom and Slack), CRM systems (Salesforce and HubSpot), and Multiple Listing Service (MLS) software (Realtor.com and Trulia).
• Social media management: Social media is a common tool for real estate professionals to build their personal brands, promote listings, and conduct outreach. You’ll need to learn the ins and outs of managing social media for business purposes.

Where and how to learn to be a real estate VA

Again, you don’t need to obtain a license the way you would if you wanted to become a real estate agent, realtor, or mortgage broker.

However, you should have basic knowledge of the real estate industry, including familiarity with the most important laws and regulations that govern it, as well as how real estate contracts are constructed.

Having this knowledge will give you an edge over your competitors: you can offer more technical services, such as proofreading contracts, processing real estate transactions, and explaining purchase agreements to buyers when your employer isn’t available.

Online courses on real estate

There are many free online resources you can search for to educate yourself. If you want to learn from professionals in a more structured way, consider taking an online course, such as The Principles of Real Estate on Coursera.

You can also look into Aceable Agent’s courses on becoming a real estate agent. These cost money (often $100–$300, depending on where you live), and if you’re happy to stay a real estate VA forever, they might be overkill.

However, if you’re harboring dreams of becoming an agent yourself someday, they’re well worth the investment, and will give you a real boost in the here and now with your virtual assistance side hustle.

Certifications for real estate assistants

Several organizations offer certification courses that are specifically designed for would-be real estate assistants.

Again, you don’t need these to land work, and realistically, most of your potential clients won’t care if you have them or not—they’re not particularly well-recognized—but the idea of diving into the world of professional real estate is intimidating, they might give you the confidence boost you need.

Look into these courses and evaluate whether they offer enough to justify the cost:

• The Real Estate Professional Assistant (REPA) certification from the Champions School of Real Estate ($250)
• The Real Estate Professional Assistant Certificate from the Real Estate Business Institute ($175)

Many real estate virtual assistants are freelancers, meaning they need to actively find clients on their own.

This can be challenging if you lack experience, but there’s no need to stress. Follow the three tips below to get started.

1. Build a professional portfolio

The most important part of getting clients as a virtual assistant is making a good first impression and convincing people that you’re capable of helping them get things done efficiently and professionally.

To do so, create a portfolio showcasing your past work, tailoring it to the positions you’ll be applying for. For instance, if you have any experience doing administrative work either in a full-time or part-time capacity, you should add that to your resume.

As you start working and gain more experience as a real estate VA, don’t forget to go back and update your portfolio periodically. This goes without saying, but applying for a job with an outdated portfolio will greatly hurt your chances of landing a new client.

2. Market your services and find clients

Start marketing yourself by creating a professional website. This can serve as your online portfolio as well as a point of contact for prospective clients.

If you don’t already have one, create a LinkedIn profile so that other professionals can discover and network with you. Consider creating social media profiles to share your work as a real estate virtual assistant as well.

As important as establishing an online presence is, it isn’t enough. You also need to actively look for clients to get your VA business off the ground. Here are three main ways to do so:

• Direct outreach: With direct outreach, you first need to identify your target clients and collect their contact information. Then, create a personalized message and cold pitch them via email, LinkedIn, social media, or some other communication method.
• Freelancing platforms: Use freelancing platforms like Upwork or Fiverr to find clients. Be sure to highlight your skills in your profile.
• Online job boards: You can also find VA work on online job boards, such as Indeed and ZipRecruiter. FlexJobs is also a great option, since it focuses specifically on remote and flex-time gigs.

Once you’ve landed a few clients and done a little work for them, ask them to leave positive reviews and refer other people who need your services to you. The best way to make your side hustle sustainable is to set things up so clients come to you instead of the other way around.

3. Once you have clients, make sure to do a great job

In addition to performing your assigned tasks well—something else that probably goes without saying—pay attention to those tiny little details that can make a huge difference.

For instance, as a remote worker, it’s important to ensure you have a strong and stable internet connection at all times so that your clients can always reach you. It’s also a good idea to regularly give your clients detailed updates on your work to build trusting working relationships.

To remain useful, follow the news and keep up with the latest developments in the real estate industry. You can do so by following real estate blogs, regularly reading industry reports, and attending professional events and gatherings.

According to ZipRecruiter, one of the largest online employment marketplaces, real estate VAs generally make around $24 per hour. 1

While it’s not clear where they sourced this number from, and we generally recommend taking figures on sites like this with a grain of salt, it’s backed up by many of the VAs we’ve talked to, who have confirmed that VAs make $15–$30 per hour on average.

Your exact pay will depend on your experience, skill set, and location. The more experienced and skilled you are—and the more expensive the city you work in is—the higher you can set your rates.

When determining your prices, research how much your competitors are charging so that you don’t overcharge or undersell yourself. As you gain more experience and establish yourself in the industry, you can and should increase your rates.