You Don't Need to Be a Top Producer to Need a Virtual Assistant

I hear the same excuse constantly from agents. "I only close a handful of deals a year, so a virtual assistant isn't for me." I get why people think that, but it's backwards. The number of deals you close has nothing to do with whether you need help. What matters is how much of your week gets eaten up by work that isn't actually moving your business forward.

Tim Ferriss laid this out years ago in The 4-Hour Work Week with a simple framework: deal, delegate, eliminate, automate. That first word, delegate, is the whole game. If you're a real estate agent or a small business owner, roughly 90% of what fills your day is admin. Emails, data entry, filing documents, scheduling. The 10% that actually grows your business is relationships, networking, and deal making. Every hour you spend on the 90% is an hour you're not spending on the 10%.

I recently sat down with my friend Greg Strauss of 716 Realty Group in Buffalo for an episode of our podcast, Free Beer and Real Estate. You can watch the full episode here. Greg has built what he calls a vertically integrated business over his 13-plus years in the industry, covering everything from home sales to vacation rentals to multifamily property management to commercial deals. He now runs a team of seven remote team members working out of Nicaragua and the Philippines. What stood out to me wasn't the size of his operation. It was how methodically he got there, one small delegated task at a time.

Start With a List of Things You Do

Before you can delegate anything, you need to know what you're actually spending your time on. I've had my own staff sit down and write out everything they do in a given week. You'll be surprised how much of it has nothing to do with generating income.

Greg's advice for anyone getting started is to hire an executive assistant first. You're the CEO of your business whether you think of yourself that way or not, and every CEO needs someone managing the inbox. Greg's first hire is now approaching her one year anniversary with him, and she manages over 350 active tags in his inbox tracking buyers, sellers, and property management clients. That role tends to grow naturally into transaction coordination too, because no matter how good your TC setup is, the attorney or the lender will still email you directly instead of going through the proper channel. Someone needs to catch that and route it.

 

You Don't Have to Hand Over the Keys on Day One

The biggest hesitation I hear from agents is trust. Handing someone your email password feels like a huge leap, and it should be, because that trust has to be earned. But you don't need to start there.

Meeting notes are one of the easiest places to begin. Greg records his appointments with an app like Otter AI and lets his assistant pull the notes and handle the follow-up communication from a separate account he doesn't even have to grant inbox access to. I do something similar with a much simpler example. Every time I walk a property, I take photos. I used to save and organize those myself. Now I just email them to my assistant Ranie, who has been with our team for about five years, and by the next morning they're filed in the right Google Drive folder. That one habit alone saves me five minutes every time I do it. Multiply that across a year and you're talking real hours back in your week.

There's a phrase I picked up from an electrical contractor years ago that stuck with me: save minutes. Minutes turn into hours, hours turn into days, and over the course of a year those small savings compound into something significant.

Vague Tasks Set Your VA Up to Fail

Tim Ferriss makes a point in his book that I think gets overlooked. If you hand a virtual assistant a vague task like "manage my social media," you're not delegating, you're setting them up to fail. That's not a task, it's a blob with no clear finish line.

The fix is building real checklists. When I create a piece of content, Ranie has about ten specific steps she runs through to turn it into a blog post and get it distributed across platforms. Greg does the same thing with his transaction pipeline. The moment a listing agreement is signed, there's a defined checklist: order photography, order the sign, schedule the open house, send the postcards, and make sure it's on the calendar. He takes it even further with what he calls "closing to infinity," a checklist that continues well past the closing table to make sure every past client ends up in the CRM, on the mailing list, and invited to client events that keep the relationship alive long after the deal is done.

If you don't already have a process written down, that's not a reason to wait. Use AI to draft a rough checklist for your own workflow, then edit it until it fits how you actually work. Starting somewhere beats waiting for the perfect system.

 

Build in Backup, Not Just Delegation

One piece of advice from Greg has stuck with me since we recorded. If a task isn't delegated two levels down in your organization, it has the ability to come right back to you. That means every role needs a backup person who understands the same responsibilities, whether it's a rest day, a vacation, or someone leaving the team entirely. Greg runs his property management division this way, with a primary person on each owner portfolio and a backup who can step in without missing a beat.

He also made a point I want every agent to sit with: you don't get what you expect, you get what you inspect. Delegating a task doesn't mean walking away from it. End of day reports, regular check-ins, and simple audits keep the system honest and often surface ideas your team comes up with that you'd never have thought of yourself.

The Math Works Even If You're Small

Depending on whether you go domestic or overseas, you're typically looking at somewhere between five and twenty dollars an hour for a virtual assistant, or a few hundred to around eight hundred dollars a month for a part-time hire through an agency. Weigh that against what your time is actually worth. If editing a video takes you an hour every week, ask yourself what that hour would be worth spent on lead generation calls, door knocking, or holding another open house instead. Editing a video doesn't generate income. Those activities do.

If you want to try this out, Upwork and Fiverr are two of the most well known platforms to find help, and Freelancer.com covers similar ground. Greg has also had good experiences with agencies like VVOV, out of Nicaragua, and Easily Virtual, which is based in Florida with team members in the Philippines. The advantage of going through an agency rather than hiring independently is that they typically handle payroll, oversight, and accountability for you, which matters a lot if you're testing this out for the first time.

The Challenge

Here's what I want you to do. Sit down and write out your own list of things you do in a typical week. Pick one or two tasks that don't need to be done by you specifically, and go hire someone to take them off your plate, even if it's just an hour or two a week to start. The risk is small. The upside, once you see what it frees you up to do instead, is the reason guys like Greg have built entire teams around it.

If you'd like to connect with Greg Strauss and his team at 716 Realty Group serving the Buffalo and Western New York area, you can reach him at greg@716realtygroup.com or by phone at 716-864-1055.

And if you're looking for real estate help here in Northeast Ohio, or you're a realtor interested in partnering with our team, reach out anytime.

Mike Ferrante
The Mike Team at LPT Realty
www.21mike.com
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