Hiring VAs Through an Agency vs. Hiring Independently — Which Has Worked Better?
Reading, PA · Member since 2026 · 3 posts · 0 votes
I've tried both routes. When I first started, I hired a VA through a company and was spending around $1,700/month for just one VA. It was expensive, but if you don't have the time or experience to train and manage someone yourself, I can definitely see the value. Now I'm spending around $2,000/month for four independent VAs. The downside is that I've had to handle the training, mistakes, and systems myself. The first month I wasn't getting the quality of leads I wanted, so I had to restructure how they qualified and followed up with sellers. After another month of tweaking things, I started seeing much better-quality leads.
For those of you who chose to hire through a VA company, how did you determine which company was the right fit for your wholesaling business, and what made them worth the additional cost? For those who hired independent VAs, how did you structure their training, compensation, KPIs, scripts, and day-to-day responsibilities to consistently get the results you wanted? Overall, which route has worked better for your wholesaling business and why?
I've tried both routes. When I first started, I hired a VA through a company and was spending around $1,700/month for just one VA. It was expensive, but if you don't have the time or experience to train and manage someone yourself, I can definitely see the value. Now I'm spending around $2,000/month for four independent VAs. The downside is that I've had to handle the training, mistakes, and systems myself. The first month I wasn't getting the quality of leads I wanted, so I had to restructure how they qualified and followed up with sellers. After another month of tweaking things, I started seeing much better-quality leads.
For those of you who chose to hire through a VA company, how did you determine which company was the right fit for your wholesaling business, and what made them worth the additional cost? For those who hired independent VAs, how did you structure their training, compensation, KPIs, scripts, and day-to-day responsibilities to consistently get the results you wanted? Overall, which route has worked better for your wholesaling business and why?
@Nicholas Lovelace, I’ve worked with both outside support and people I manage more directly, and I’ve found that the bigger difference is usually the system behind them, not where they were hired.
When I bring someone into a role, I like to be very clear about what they own, what a good lead looks like, what needs to be tracked, and what I expect to see each week. I also like reviewing actual work early instead of waiting a month for the numbers to tell me something is wrong. With independent VAs especially, I would also have clear agreements around confidentiality, access to your systems, client information, and what happens when the relationship ends. It sounds like you already learned the most important part, which is that hiring more people does not fix a process that still needs work.
Sorry, I am going to give you a drastically different answer. Before hiring a VA, please try the newer AI tools like Muse, Grok Bot or Instinct. These are incredibly effective, they work all the time and don't fall sick! Muse and Instinct are pretty much free right now. They might not be able to do 100% of the work, but I am sure they will do more than 50%.
In the past, I have posted job on Indeed myself and hired people myself (even in other countries). But in that case, the training, testing and eventually removing them if it's not working out - the effort required for that remains. But I will still do it this way - hire the person myself rather than depending on the agency.
I've tried both routes. When I first started, I hired a VA through a company and was spending around $1,700/month for just one VA. It was expensive, but if you don't have the time or experience to train and manage someone yourself, I can definitely see the value. Now I'm spending around $2,000/month for four independent VAs. The downside is that I've had to handle the training, mistakes, and systems myself. The first month I wasn't getting the quality of leads I wanted, so I had to restructure how they qualified and followed up with sellers. After another month of tweaking things, I started seeing much better-quality leads.
For those of you who chose to hire through a VA company, how did you determine which company was the right fit for your wholesaling business, and what made them worth the additional cost? For those who hired independent VAs, how did you structure their training, compensation, KPIs, scripts, and day-to-day responsibilities to consistently get the results you wanted? Overall, which route has worked better for your wholesaling business and why?
@Nicholas Lovelace, I’ve worked with both outside support and people I manage more directly, and I’ve found that the bigger difference is usually the system behind them, not where they were hired.
When I bring someone into a role, I like to be very clear about what they own, what a good lead looks like, what needs to be tracked, and what I expect to see each week. I also like reviewing actual work early instead of waiting a month for the numbers to tell me something is wrong. With independent VAs especially, I would also have clear agreements around confidentiality, access to your systems, client information, and what happens when the relationship ends. It sounds like you already learned the most important part, which is that hiring more people does not fix a process that still needs work.
It really depends on how much control you want.
If you want less control over the VA and are willing to pay a little bit more, then an agency can work well.
For me, I found that I wanted more control because I wanted to train my VAs and have them do certain things a certain way. I also wanted to pay a little bit less. That does come with the added responsibility of managing the VAs yourself, but I preferred that because I was able to build the systems around how I wanted things done.
Another thing to take into account is the position. From my experience, having VAs in-house has worked really well for the admin side and cold calling side because I’ve built systems around how we hire, train, and manage them.
An agency can definitely work if you find a good one, though. Just know that you’re typically going to pay a premium. I would also make sure the expectations for exactly what they need to be doing are established upfront with the agency so everyone is clear on what success looks like.
Four VAs on bad leads is the expensive version of this problem. The fix that worked for a team I build for was sorting before the VAs: every reply gets checked on asking price against the Zillow value, condition and timeline, and anything that fails gets an automatic follow-up instead of a human. The VAs only open the ones that pass.
I might be a bit biased, but I don’t think anyone with a big pipeline has the time to do this well alone. Someone has to monitor calls, watch the dialer, and keep pulling and uploading fresh data over and over. Then you’re checking daily: are we getting enough conversations, are the callers actually working, is the list still good? There’s a lot to it, and it competes with the time you need for closing deals.
Also, a lot of bad VA results are really bad data or a weak follow-up process, not bad VAs. Fix the list and the CRM follow-up before blaming the person.
My take: if you have the time to build and run the systems, independent usually wins on cost. If your time is better spent on closing, outsourcing is worth the premium. Some people start with a company to learn what good looks like, then bring it in-house.