BPO stands for business process outsourcing and it’s changing the corporate landscape by making businesses more efficient. Thus, the cutthroat world of real estate is realizing that leveraging real estate BPO services is necessary to remain a forward-thinking business in this day and age.
In this article, we’ll explore the services that BPO companies offer and the benefits that result.
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ToggleTo answer this question, we need to discuss business process outsourcing a bit more. Outsourcing in general means delegating specific tasks to a third party. Many business owners leverage outsourcing to improve profit margins by distributing workloads between in-house and outside staff. This way, they can focus all of their efforts on dollar-producing tasks.
A BPO company provides offshore talent to complete your business’s back-office or non-essential duties. These types of outsourcing companies offer a wide range of services that span several industries. Thus, the services offered can vary slightly based on the industry that’s using them.
In real estate outsourcing, BPO services provide help with non-essential tasks associated with the buying, selling, leasing, and managing of real estate properties.
Common work that real estate agencies outsource is content marketing, accounting, general administration, market research, and data entry. We’ll explore each one below.
Marketing will always be a tremendously important task for any business. So, while it doesn’t fall into the category of non-essential duties, it’s still wise to outsource if you don’t already have a marketing team. Leveraging an outside party to help with content marketing is a real estate outsourcing trend because most real estate entrepreneurs, like sales agents and property owners, don’t have their own marketing crew on hand.
Content marketing is a real estate BPO service that offers marketing specialists like top-notch writers, web designers, and SEO experts to help you increase brand awareness.
Here are a few tasks that content marketing services provide.
Write blogs and social media posts
Post and update MLS listings
Manage social media pages and website
Create email campaigns
Repurpose content for SEO
Develop advertisements for your target audience
A BPO virtual assistant or team can ensure your payroll, property budgets, and accounting projects are well-managed. Likewise, delegating accounting duties can also cover lease accounting services, such as making sure rental fees and taxes are collected on time for a streamlined cash flow.
A BPO company that specializes in providing staff to real estate businesses will have talent that can handle all industry-related admin duties. General administration covers a wide range of responsibilities, but here are a few that real estate professionals commonly seek support for.
Responding to all inbound inquiries
Making outbound calls to current clients and new leads
Ensuring the MLS is properly updated
Managing the CRM for current and previous clients
Facilitating the application process and closing paperwork
Calendar management for property tours and client meetings
A real estate BPO service can provide you with a commercial real estate virtual assistant to help out with industry and market research for your business’s target area. This may include analyzing current market trends, researching comparable prices for properties you’re selling, and reaching out to prospective buyers.
Data entry sometimes falls under the umbrella of general admin duties. But, because there are many different types of real estate data, we’ve given it its own category.
The list can be exhaustive, so here are a few common real estate documents that data entry can take care of.
Sales records
Property tax information
Buy/Sell contracts and agreements
Leasing contracts
Property deeds
Title insurance policies
Data entry is preceded by its reputation for being extremely tedious and challenging work. And many real estate transactions demand copious amounts of data that need to be entered, saved, and processed accurately. Any data that isn’t entered flawlessly poses the threat of client disputes. So, it makes sense why booming real estate businesses outsource data entry tasks.
You can have all of the services we’ve mentioned, from content marketing to data entry, performed by a BPO company, but sometimes businesses choose to delegate tasks to a freelancer. So, let’s take a look at the difference between these two outsourcing options.
A freelancer who’s hired to help a business from an outside location can be referred to as a virtual assistant (VA) when they perform non-essential duties. So, if you’re wondering, “What’s a VA in real estate”, it’s a freelancer or independent contractor who typically assists real estate agencies or property management firms with non-dollar producing tasks.
If you choose to go down the freelance route, you’ll end up spending more time, effort, and money sourcing the right talent. It’s no picnic sorting through a large talent pool of freelancers as you try to determine the best one for your needs. Furthermore, a freelancer will rarely have sufficient training in whatever real estate task you want to hand off; thus, you’ll likely need to spend time and money on onboarding and training.
When you opt for real estate BPO services, you’re quickly provided with a large pool of skilled workers who already have the appropriate training to meet your business’s needs. Likewise, a BPO company can source and prep talent much faster than you and a few of your in-house staff can. Thus, going through a BPO company saves you ample time in mixing and matching virtual assistants to find the right fit.
Real estate outsourcing companies provide numerous benefits that growing firms can’t get anywhere else. Four main advantages are reduced costs, streamlined processes, extra time for core tasks, and gaining a competitive edge.
One of the most well-known perks of offering virtual assistant real estate jobs through BPO services is the tremendous amount of money you save. Outsourcing doesn’t require office space, so you’ll save money on rent. Also, BPO companies leverage low-cost markets, such as the Philippines, where you don’t have to spend as much money on labor wages. Thus, BPO services help you improve your performance in all directions without breaking the bank.
Real estate BPO services allow you to streamline complicated processes that come with the job, like sales transactions and closings. You can trust a BPO company to expedite your more tedious business processes without compromising on accuracy.
Utilizing a virtual assistant for your real estate business will enable you to do more dollar-producing tasks. This is because when you outsource non-essential, time-consuming duties to a third party, you get more time and energy to concentrate on the profit-making parts of your business.
A huge benefit of using BPO services is that you’re guaranteed to be matched with talent who have industry experience. This is because real estate BPO companies have developed infrastructures to serve all of your industry-specific needs. As a result, you’ll gain a competitive advantage because you’ll be able to consistently access expertise and technology that you don’t have in-house.
Whatever kind of real estate entrepreneur you are– whether that be an agent, a broker, a developer, or a property manager– using real estate BPO services is something you can’t ignore to stay relevant in today’s market.
At RocketStation, we’ll give you affordable virtual teammates who know the ins and outs of the real estate industry so you can scale up your business.