Bob is the founder and CEO of REVA global, a real estate virtual assistant staffing company. In this episode, Bob will tell us how we can use virtual assistants to scale our business at an affordable cost and how we should interact with our team members to make the most of our relationships.
Bob had gone to Boston University and left when he was two classes short of a degree. He played professional hockey for eight years, four in the U.S. and four in Europe. When he was done playing, he faced a decision whether to go back to school and get his degree or try his luck in an industry with a low barrier of entry. After doing some research and not wanting to go back to school, he went into real estate investing.
Lack of consistency. Investors would start doing something and not finish. They get fired up for one week, but they’ll stop next week. They lose momentum.
It takes a couple of months before you see results. When Bob started in real estate, he was the one making cold calls and knocking on doors. It gets tiring after a while, but you shouldn’t let that beat you down. For many people, that’s what ends up happening. They get tired, so they don’t follow through.
Bob farmed areas for a year. He had no system and just went through neighborhoods looking for property to buy. Also, he didn’t have any contractors. He had to keep going and going which eventually led to finding a business partner, door knocking, skip tracing, and getting an assistant.
Virtual assistants can be given tasks to find leads. For example, virtual assistants will look for tax-delinquent properties. They’ll scrub the lists and skip trace them. Then they’ll call up the owner.
Some would also go to Craigslist or Zillow. They’d compile lists then send text messages to agents or investors to make offers between 65-80% of the value listed in Zillow. The end goal is for them to do a warm transfer to the investor once the seller is interested in their offer.
There are a lot of things you can have virtual assistants do. It could be something to do with calls, text messages, and ringless voicemail. Bob found it helpful to let them go through lists of properties in pre-foreclosure, tax liens, probate, or those with out-of-state owners. Then they’ll put them in the auto-dialer, do callbacks before forwarding a lead to an acquisition team.
Virtual assistants use Launch Control to send a canned text message. They’re trained on how to respond to the different replies they receive.
Those who do outbound calls in Bob’s team use Five9. It’s more robust but also more expensive. He recommends using Mojo Dialer for those hiring just one virtual assistant to do calls as Five9 can be very confusing.
They also use a local number as a callback number. It goes directly to voicemail then the virtual assistants will just call them back. REVA gets 38% interested to sell (ITS) rates from their callbacks.
REVA uses Five9 for their voicemail system. Another option is Call Rail.
Clients have to purchase the tools themselves, but REVA can help them set it up.
Since there’s a 12-hour difference between the U.S. and the Philippines, they work at night. Virtual assistants work U.S. hours from 9 am to 5 pm or 10 am to 6 pm.
REVA has a recruitment team in the Philippines. They go through a number of steps to ensure they hit the qualities that REVA wants. It includes having a four-year college degree, being proficient in English, having a neutral accent, and experience working in the call center industry for at least a year.
REVA has already placed 1,500 virtual assistants through the years.
REVA placed an extra layer to ensure virtual assistants are actually working. They have client service managers who manage virtual assistants. Virtual assistants are required to send the start of day and end of day reports that lists all the tasks they did during the day.
Not counting his attorney, money lenders, and the recruitment team in the Philippines, REVA has three people in the U.S. Their end goal is to funnel the leads there.
It usually involves not being clear with roles, responsibilities, requirements, and results. Before hiring a virtual assistant, it’s important to do these first:
Identify the exact role you want to fill. Do you want someone making calls or doing bookkeeping?
List all the tasks you want to be done. Do you want them to go to social media every day, do you want them to-do lists, do skip tracing, etc.
What are the requirements you want from that individual? Do you want someone with call center experience? This is for tasks that involve making calls.
Be clear about the results you want. Do due diligence and don’t have unrealistic expectations.
For REVA, their virtual assistants do cold calls for 8 hours. But they have periodic breaks. After talking with someone, they update the notes. It leads to an automatic email in REVA’s inbox with all the information they want. Then they make calls again.
They also have a virtual assistant who does the skip tracing by using websites like FastPeopleSearch.com. But they’re also testing out a skip tracing service.
Look at their past experience. Do they have call center experience?
When talking with them, look at how their English is. Do they have a deep accent or not?
Do they have capacity? There are seven different types of capacity according to “The 5 Levels of Leadership” by John Maxwell: energy capacity, emotional capacity, thinking capacity, people capacity, creative capacity, production capacity, and leadership capacity.
You want someone who has all of those capacities working for you.
REVA offers part-time and full-time virtual assistants. Part-timers work 20 hours a week and full-timers work 40 hours a week. They don’t do project-based work because it’s a whole niche that has a different management style.
Each virtual assistant and client is assigned a client service manager as part of their team. The client service manager makes sure the virtual assistant reports for work, sends the daily reports and is hitting the metrics of the team.
They also have an outbound dialing company with a team of virtual assistants making cold calls.
Each client is given a dedicated virtual assistant. REVA will find the virtual assistant that matches with all the tasks a client wants.
Everything starts first with the recruiting team who will track hundreds and hundreds of applications in the Philippines. They’ll do the interviews and systems check such as the right computer and internet speed, and a backup. Then they get one-month training on making cold calls, building lists, social media, and other things. While the virtual assistants are trained to follow a script when making calls or sending text messages, clients often tweak the script a little bit.
Once they have a client, the placement team looks at the tasks the client wants to be done, whether they want an inside sales agent (ISA) or phone virtual assistant, or an administrative virtual assistant. Then they’ll match those tasks with the virtual assistants they need.
After the matchup, they’ll be put together with their operations team which includes the client service manager. Clients get access to the virtual assistant on a daily basis and can request the client service manager to put in additional systems in place and train the virtual assistant for new tasks.
Part-time virtual assistants cost $10.60 per hour and full-time virtual assistants cost $9.60 per hour. REVA pays a competitive salary to their virtual assistants because they don’t want them to leave. REVA has one of the highest retention rates in the industry because they offer benefits such as loans and insurance.
For the pricing of outbound dialing, potential clients should just call REVA Global.
New investors should start with one virtual assistant. It’s important to break down their business and understand what tasks they want to outsource. You could break it down into marketing, lead intake, deal analysis, making offers, and closing.
New investors should focus mostly on marketing whether you’re going to be doing outbound dialing, text messaging, ringless voicemail, callbacks, and inbound calls.
Follow-ups are one of the biggest pain points for investors. On average, 70% of all properties are bought through follow-ups. REVA’s virtual assistants have a follow-up nurture campaign that they implement every month. Every month, they would email, text message, and call the leads.
Take action. Other than not having consistency, not taking action is something new investors make a mistake of doing.
Always follow through and don’t quit too early.
Don’t expect to make money until nine months.
When working with virtual assistants, it takes a little time to get them up and running. They’re not going to start making money for you from day one. Give it time, it takes two to three months.
Be patient. Real estate makes people a lot of money but it takes time.
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