In a commercial real estate agency, your time is a critical part of your day. How you use your time will impact your listings and commissions. If you waste your time you lose money.

There are limits to what you can do as an individual salesperson. If you are fortunate to be able to attract good listings, you will still have limits on what you can do individually. You will need a personal assistant (PA). Over time a good PA can do a lot for you in backup and momentum.

Let’s look at the facts:

• A good agent can only handle about 15 to 20 exclusive listings without stretching the limits of performance and client service.
• Your clients are going to require ongoing contact every couple of days.
• Your exclusive listings need to be marketed in different ways to the prospects that are coming in to the agency.
• Your telephone prospecting should be bringing in the leads and requests for information and property inspections.
• Every day you should be inspecting properties with qualified prospects.
• Your database should be kept up to date personally
• Deals need to be negotiated and documented.
• You will be on the look out for more buyers and tenants

So how much spare time do you have? ‘Not much’ is the typical answer that I hear.

In saying all of this, one thing should be noted. Good salespeople are not good when it comes to staying on task and being organised. Under pressure things get missed or delayed. The end result is a missed opportunity or an unhappy client. So I go back to the point that a top agent should be supported by a good Personal Assistant.

Here are some things for the PA to do for you:

1. Prepare draft advertising for approval of clients
2. Constructing the campaigns for all your exclusive listings
3. Lodging all listing marketing with the selected media
4. Tracking responses from marketing campaigns
5. Doing a signboard and internet count weekly of properties listed for sale or lease in your local area
6. Tracking time on market with your competitors listings
7. Preparing information packets to be sent out to qualified buyers and tenants
8. Getting your newsletters ready for weekly despatch
9. Doing your outbound direct mail
10. Keeping your database under control and updated
11. Checking your emails for ordinary issues that they can attend to for you

So how can you take the ‘quantum leap’ forward with a personal assistant? It all comes down to cost.

As you build your market and commissions, you can create a ‘financial buffer’ where you can employ a full or part time PA. The alternative up until that time is to use an online ‘virtual assistant’ to get some traction on the mundane things that just have to be done by someone. A ‘virtual assistant’ is a controllable cost and doesn’t need to be a large overhead for you.

Take a serious look at your workload now and see the best ways to free up your valuable time.