Can I Get Some Assistance Over Here?

You’ve probably been in Lowes or Home Depot or some other home improvement place recently. Not that you should be in there buying a truckload of materials, but there’s the matter of choosing finishes or even just getting a key cut.

By the way - attention newbie investors: If you know nothing about construction, those big box stores are a great place to browse through every now and then. You can get a sense of what materials cost and they even have installed prices on some things. Construction sneaks into a lot of areas of real estate – it’s not just for rehabbers. Wholesalers and buy-and-hold investors need to know something about repair costs to survive.

Suppose you’re in Lowes and you need that key cut. Have you noticed the little buttons in different departments – you press the button and, voila, an employee shows up to assist you. While I’m sure that’s a huge pain for the employees busy with other work, it’s does make our lives easier.

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a little button we could press when we needed assistance in real estate? While the internet and local clubs are full of real estate information, I’m talking about assistance in getting the day-to-day work done. For that you need an assistant of some sort.

I’ve been looking into this stuff for my own business of late and thought I’d share some of what I’ve found. After all, some investors have mastered the obstacle of employing help, but most have not. Many of us are limiting our efforts by not getting the right support.

As I think through this, I’m already realizing I’m biting off too much for a simple blog. But I’ll take a crack at a couple options.

Obviously there’s hiring a local assistant. You hire them, train them what you want them to do, pay them $10-20 an hour, or preferably you set it up for them to work on a commission base or some other non-employee (non W-2) arrangement. Local folks can mean local headaches – ask anyone who has ever hired someone. But they can do things like post bandit signs or show a vacancy, even run your errands or do your laundry – things you can’t get done any other way than local.

Next comes virtual assistants (VA’s). These folks are semi-trained in office/real estate tasks. They are “virtual” in the sense that they aren’t in your office, but they are real people. You can get foreign or US-based VA’s. US based VA’s are $20+ an hour while foreign VA’s are as cheap as $3 an hour. The nice part of VA’s is they only bill while they’re working on your stuff, so you don’t pay for them to go to the water cooler or to “look busy”. The advantage of US-based is they don’t have heavy accents (e.g. if talking to your sellers) and they work US hours. There’s lots of places to find VA’s, but you might check out VirtualOfficeVA.com or sspvas.com for US and foreign-based, respectively.

There are also sites like Fiverr.com or UpWork.com where you can seek out freelancers for one-time or ongoing work. You can get stuff done way cheaper than you could do it yourself – anything you could image from bookkeeping to handling your web presence to writing a jingle!

Well that’s enough for now. Those sites ought to keep your head spinning for a while. There are several other channels we didn’t even get into – call answering services or web based apps that do all sorts of work for you. Now go and be more productive by not trying to do everything yourself!