What Is the Highest and Best Use of Your Time as a Real Estate Investor?

As a multifamily syndicator the best use of your time is to find deals, raise money and create content to attract and engage your investors. 

If you’re looking for deals, the best use of your time is build relationships with brokers. THAT precisely is the best use of your time. The second best use is analyzing deals and making offers, even though the analysis part could potentially be outsourced.

If you’re raising money, the best use of your time is to build relationships with potential investors. While the relationship-building part can’t be outsourced, the administrative parts of this process CAN be outsourced to a virtual assistant.

By now you know that in order to attract more capital, you need to build a platform and produce content that attracts and engages more investors. You should not outsource the creation of the content but you should outsource the production of the content.

Another way to figure out what you should outsource to a VA is to determine your hourly rate and outsource anything that could be done by someone whose hourly rate is less than yours.

What Is Your Hourly Rate?

Let’s say your first deal has a $2M purchase price. Further assume that the acquisition fee is 3% or $60,000. Let’s say you partner with a more experienced syndicator to close the deal and help raise the money.

To make it worthwhile to your partner, you give him 70% of the general partnership. This would leave you with 30% of the acquisition fee or $18,000.

Let’s say you slave 10 hours per week for 4 months to find and close this deal (while you still have a full-time job, of course). That’s a total of 160 hours!

If you divide that the $18,000 acquisition fee you get your hourly rate:

$113

Cool, right?

And now you know that if you can hire a virtual assistant at LESS than your hourly rate, you can spend more time on things that create the most value – the kinds of things only YOU can do, like finding deals and raising money.

THAT is your highest and best use of your time.

OK, now that we know what our hourly rate is, what kind of things could your virtual assistant do you for you?

How Your Virtual Assistant Can Make Your Life Better

Look for ways to outsource and delegate in all parts of your life, even if you have a W-2 job. Hey, executives have assistants, why shouldn’t you? Just because your company doesn’t provide one for you doesn’t mean you can’t make the hire yourself!

For instance, a local personal assistant could free up your time by running errands to the dry cleaner or grocery store. You could have them organize events like birthday parties or drive your kids to their activities.

If you have a 9-to-5, a virtual assistant can take care of scheduling meetings, making travel arrangements or doing expense reports. Basically, any administrative task that is repetitive or can be taught quickly qualifies.

Ideas for How Syndicators Might Use a VA

What kind of administrative tasks can syndicators outsource to an assistant? VAs can help with…

1. Deal finding
2. Investor relations
3. Content creation

On the deal finding side, you can hire a virtual assistant do market research. My Deal Maker Blueprint Training & Certification provides a methodology for finding the best areas for investing. Have your VA follow the module and create a spreadsheet from the available reports. You just saved 5 hours!

Your VA could also research a list of brokers for you through LoopNet or create a roster of potential property managers. Another idea is to have a VA do light underwriting for you: Give them the Syndicated Deal Analyzer video and ask them to format deals for you in Excel per the instructions.

A VA can even help you with investor relations. VAs can remind potential investors about calls they’ve scheduled with you (and chase them down when they don’t show up). You can have your VA mail thank you notes and gifts, set up training or deal webinars, and handle any follow-up emails. And if your investors need reminders about signing documents and wiring money, your VA can do that too!

Finally, your VA can help you build out your platform – and attract potential investors – by finding useful articles and reports to share, posting content to your blog or social media channels, and scheduling emails for your list.

How to Hire a Real Estate Investing Virtual Assistant

So, now you know the value a VA can bring. But how do you go about finding and hiring one?

I recommend a free site called Upwork, where you can post a job and hire qualified and capable virtual assistants from all over the world. And the platform offers more than just VAs. You can hire web developers, writers, graphic designers, content developers, social media managers… The list goes on.

Simply post a job description, outlining the skills and expertise you’re looking for. From there, freelancers will apply with a cover letter, and you can evaluate based on their ratings and past work on the site.

Message the ones you like and set up a Zoom call. And once you’ve made a decision, you hire the VA and pay them through the site! (I suggest hiring for a short-term project to begin with. Find out what it’s like to work with the person before you make a long-term commitment. That way, if it doesn’t work out, you’re off the hook to try someone else.)

Yes, it can be time intensive to find the right person. But it’s worth it based on the time you will save in the long run! If you don’t have that kind of time up front, but you do have money to invest in the process of finding a virtual assistant…

Virtual Staff Finder is the best and quickest headhunter service on the web for finding highly qualified VAs. It’s based in the Philippines and run by my buddy, Chris Ducker. For $495, his team finds 3 fully vetted potential candidates for you. Chris is a thought leader on the topic of virtual entrepreneurship, and this is a great service if you have the money to invest.

Final Thoughts

So, take a hard look at how you are spending your time. If you’re wasting it on activities that someone else could do, hire a virtual assistant and see how it changes your life!

Drill down to what is the highest and best use of your time and eliminate anything that is below your hourly rate or that you don’t enjoy (or aren’t good at).

Find a qualified candidate through Upwork or Virtual Staff Finder, depending on your budget, and assign them the administrative stuff – so you can focus on finding deals and raising money!

If you could use some help with those high-value activities, our Investor Incubator mentoring program may be just what you’re looking for. Schedule a no-obligation call with us to see if there’s a fit!