One of the ways you can grow your real estate business is by freeing up the time you spend on mundane and administrative tasks. For many realtors, its often cost-prohibitive to hire an assistant, when salary, taxes, benefits and other expenses are included. Many realtors have capitalized on the opportunity to hire a virtual assistant from the Philippines.
Now, before we go any further, let’s go over a few realities about outsourcing to the Philippines, because it’s something you may not have thought about before:
- Filipinos are taught English in school. As a result, most college educated Filipinos are fluent in reading/writing English.
- Many outsourced call centers have physical locations in the Philippines, thus many Filipino workers have experience working with global customers, and speaking fluent English.
- Many Filipinos looking for work are licensed real estate agents in the Philippines.
- Most Filipinos looking for work are internet savvy, which can be a tremendous benefit to your business.
This doesn’t mean that everything is perfect and you’ll be able to find a superstar who can take most of your work off your hands. Like any employee, you will need to provide training on what you need and how you want things done. However, when you find the right employee, you can outsource tasks like:
- Managing your property listings
- Basic client correspondence
- Managing your blog, website and social media
- Photo editing and retouching
- Online advertising/marketing, SEO and content marketing
- Telephone correspondence, appointment setting and scheduling
- Online lead generation
And the great thing is you can hire someone with education and experience for anywhere from $350-650 per month, for full time work! Just imagine what you could do with that much help in your business. Just think of how much you can grow!
Having said that, let’s talk about the elephant in the room. Have you heard outsourcing horror stories? Yes! Can things go wrong? Absolutely. Have you heard horror stories of hiring regular employees? Absolutely! So where am I going with this? Any time you hire someone you have some risk involved, a chance that things won’t work out and you’ve wasted money and/or time. The biggest tip I can give you is to take outsourcing as seriously as you would hiring a regular employee. Most people are stringent with “real world” hiring but treat outsourcing as though they can just find the “perfect profile”, hire the person and things magically fall into place. You would not treat a regular hire that way and outsourcing is no different.
With all of that said, we have a few resources for you. First, bookmark this page so you can get back to it. You can download a few of our ebooks here (they are free) if you love to read and want to learn more about outsourcing. You can search our database for qualified Filipinos looking for work. You can join our Facebook group if you want feedback from other employers, just like you. Or you can contact us if you need one-on-one help.