I hired a Phillipines VA on odesk.com to perform a big data entry task a few months ago and she was great. And cheap is an understatement…can you say $2.22/hour…over 6 hours of data entry work for a grand total of $14.04 (including odesk’s fees).
I’m now trying to figure out what other kind of menial tasks I can push on to a VA. I’m thinking creating, posting, and blasting electronic listings for my houses, and maybe even having one who speaks good English return voicemails from buyers and sellers, enter their info into my buyers & sellers lists, and maybe even schedule showings.
I’m curious to find out what capacity others are using VAs and how your experience has panned out.
We use VAs all the time. We have 2 - one for data entry ($1 per hour) and one to handle all our sellers leads, including phone calls to sellers ($4 per hour).
Data entry - probate leads, evictions, divorces, looking up owners of vacant houses, etc. - basically any online source of leads they will track it down.
Seller leads - set up contact in our contact management system (KarmaCRM), make the initial call and fill out an online lead sheet, look up comps and property detail info and attach to contact record, once I calculate the offer, they then make the offer call to the seller and create the contract if it is accepted.
We are getting ready to train the second VA on doing some of the Buyer side activity next…
I literally JUST hired a VA for phone support at $3/hr from Odesk. It’s an agency too so I have redundancy. They’re gonna pretty much do exactly what your phone call VA does, which is call back all messages that are left when people call my voicemails. I sent a series of specific instructions and scripts for them to utilize depending on the nature of the call (seller, retail buyer, wholesale buyer, etc).
WOOWWWW your people even make your offers for you…that is too awesome!
Really like the idea of the separate data entry VA.
I use Open Road business mgmt platform. Never heard of KarmaCRM looking up
check out my blog at the website in my signature - for some reason I’m not allowed to post links to blogs in posts so you’ll have to look around to find the post I did on Karma
Wow we have a lot in common…I’m currently using Realeflow/Open Road as well and I agree the cost is outrageous compared to Karma. Opened up a Karma account yesterday but haven’t put it to work yet…I will today. The Basic plan will suit me fine, at $19/mo vs $97 it’s a no brainer.
One thing I’ll miss with Open Road is the squeeze pages but I have another website system I can point them to if need be, although it’s just a “regular” website. I’ve become partial to the Realeflow/Open Road “squeeze pages.” Who are you using for websites/squeeze pages?
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Hired a $1/hr data entry VA the other day. Right now I only have her emailing FSBOs to set up cooperative assignments and also reposting my craigslist ads every 48 hours.
Now that I have 2 of them up and running I plan to push pretty much everything on them short of calculating and making offers, although if Cincyben can have them even make offers for him then I know it can be done. But for now as long as that’s all I’m doing then I don’t mind doing that for the time being.
I have used various VA services, but the one I currently use is out of Sri Lanka. I have him pull local leads and compare them against tax records. I pay $4.00 per hour, but he communicates in perfect English and puts together excellent databases.
Great posts on VAs! I’m into wholesaling properties in the Chicagoland area. Instead of hiring VAs for your business, you should seriously consider hiring interns. Instead of paying them an hourly wage, I just pay them on a commission base (20-50% of the profits of the deals that come through them). I work with several interns across the country. Now, I’m really starting to see the value of interns and how building a team of them can really take your business to a whole new level.
VAs can be a big waste of time and money. The great thing about interns is, the worst that could happen is that you get a bad intern (I’ve had quite a few.) But in that case, just hire another one (or a couple more.) There’s no limit to how many you can work with and you don’t need to pay them unless they make money (in which case you both make money.)
I have a recently been helping other people hire their own interns by giving them all the files and resources that I use to hire and manage my interns (job descriptions, interview script, email templates, list of tasks, etc.) I’d be more than willing to share any and all these files with you or anyone else that desires them.