When real estate is more than just a job to you, when you’re passionate about what you do and you want to know that you’re doing everything possible to reach your goals, it’s essential to find a real estate assistant who can be there to help you every step of the way.

How can you be sure that you’re finding a real estate assistant who’s going to be able to offer the services that you need? How can you know not only what a real estate assistant can do but also how that real estate assistant has worked out for others in the past.

There are two surefire ways to make it happen:

1. Ask to see samples from the real estate assistant’s portfolio.
2. Ask the person that you’re thinking about bringing on to see his or her references.

When you’re able to see what an assistant can do for you, you’ll find that checking into the experiences that others have had is the best way to find out whether or not she’s the right match for what you need.

Plenty of real estate professionals already work with Settlement Room to manage the process of home buying from the time a purchase agreement is made until the closing. Others create feature sheets with IMPREV, or use other programs that help them to establish a comparative market analysis for each sellers’ property.

What those agents might not be aware of is that real estate assistants are often familiar with and use the same programs.

If you’re maintaining schedules, doing the research on home values and creating feature sheets yourself, chances are good that your real estate business is not going to be as successful as it could be. If you’re sitting behind your computer, you’re not out in the field – you’re not showing homes or working with sellers to get their homes ready for sale. And if you’re not in the field, well, chances are good that you’re not making as many sales as you otherwise could.

That’s why it’s a great idea to bring on a real estate assistant who can do the paperwork, maintain schedules and coordinate the process for you: that way, you can focus on the most profitable part of your business, working directly with buyers and sellers.

Some people still have this notion that the website that was created for them a few years ago is as effective as it needs to be. They figure that they’ve got the basics covered and that, since they still have clients who visit the site, that’s good enough.

When it comes to real estate professionals, there’s this knowledge that a home with a bathroom that was last decorated in the 1970s is going to be a detriment to selling a home. They understand that modern appliances and updated windows have the opposite effect – they help to sell the home.

Websites work in the same way. You might be content with your real estate website, but is it as beneficial to your clients as it could be? If not, you might want to hire a real estate assistant who can update your website.

What can a real estate assistant do to modernize your site?

1. Redesign the pages of your site so that it’s easier for visitors to find the information that they’re looking for.
2. Add new photos, downloadable files and even podcasts that better describe the services you offer.
3. Provide some search engine optimization services that will help you to draw in more traffic.
4. Add a blog and social networking tools to help give your viewers more reasons to come back.
5. Add virtual tours and other real estate marketing tools to your site that will provide benefits to your clients.

Just like you want the homes you’re selling to have curb appeal, you want to make sure that visitors are getting as much as possible out of your website. Why not work with someone who can make sure that happens?

When you’re working with sellers, sometimes it’s a little bit challenging to get them to understand the concept of home staging.

You know that the home needs to look great. You know that, when they walk through the property, buyers are going to want to walk in and see a clean slate because you know that a buyer isn’t going to act unless he or she can see turning the house into a home.

The problem is that you don’t have the time to go to every seller to point out what could be done to increase the curb appeal of the home. You don’t have the time to talk to them about fixing up the kitchen, improving the lighting or cleaning out the clutter.

So how is it going to be done?

One way is for you to bring on a real estate assistant who can offer home staging assistance to your clients – someone who can go through the home with them and ensure that needed changes are made.

Another option is to work with a real estate assistant who can design a home staging brochure to make sure that your sellers know what they should be doing.

You can give your clients the basics, but that doesn’t mean you’ll have the time to work with them all one on one. With the right real estate assistant on your side, offering these services will be easier than you may have thought – and that will help you attract more sellers.

Email marketing is still a relatively new concept for a lot of real estate pros. You’ve got talking sellers through the process down; you’re great at helping buyers figure out what they’re looking for in a home. But an auto responder? Some of you may not even know quite what an auto responder is.

If you’re not sure what an auto responder is, here’s a quick breakdown: it’s a tool that lets you respond to leads by email without having to remember to send out the message. More importantly, it’s an email tool that will keep you from being overwhelmed by requests for information about your services, a way of giving your clients tips and tools that will show them why you’re the right agent for them.

And the best news is that you don’t need to be a tech genius to use an auto responder to take control over your email marketing: a real estate assistant can set up an auto responder for you.

What does that mean exactly? It means that you’ll have someone who can set up an account with an email marketing company. It means that you’ll have someone who creates powerful sales messages that don’t push for the hard sell, messages that help your leads to establish faith in what you’re offering.

That way, whenever someone requests more information you can be sure that they’re getting all that they need – and you won’t have to be behind the keyboard sending messages out to your prospects.

As a real estate pro, you can walk into a home and offer all sorts of tips that will help the sellers to sell. There are lawn makeovers – giving the home curb appeal. There’s the interior makeover – more light over here, move the family photos, brighten up the kitchen and bedroom.

But even the most savvy agents sometimes overlook an area of their own business that could use a bit of a makeover – their marketing materials.

When is the last time that you really looked at your business logo? Does it sum up your business well? Is it recognizable?

What about your brochures – the ones for you business that you pass out to buyers and sellers along with the ones that you design for a particular homeowner that you’re working with? Do you create them with just a standard template?

You may not have the time (or the inspiration) to re-do your marketing materials, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t need a makeover. Why not hire a real estate assistant to create a fresh, new, appealing look for your marketing materials?

The right real estate assistant can look at your vision and business plan and capture it in the look and feel of your marketing materials. As a result, you’ll find yourself attracting more clients and will have a far more recognized brand.

Have you taken your real estate business online? Is your website attracting attention, or is it just taking up space?

Many people in real estate think that having a website is enough. Unfortunately, having a real estate website without marketing it is an awful lot like taking a listing from a seller and not entering it into the MLS or holding an open house: people don’t really show up if they don’t know the site is there.

Not everyone who goes into real estate is going to be tech savvy. Not everyone will have a great internet marketing action plan.

So, does that mean it’s wasted effort to get a website up and running for your real estate website? Of course not. It just means that it’s a good idea to bring on a real estate assistant who can set a marketing plan into action for you.

This is especially the case if you choose to work with a real estate virtual assistant: think about it – who better to market your website than a virtual professional who markets his or her own site?

When you’re working in real estate, there just might come a time when you know that you need help but you don’t know where to turn to find it. How can you determine if a real estate assistant is right for you?

The first thing that you’ll want to do is take a look at what your needs are. Do you need help with clerical work – maintaining your calendar, getting the phones answered, organizing your database and just keeping track of the office? Do you need help with listing coordination: designing postcards, creating feature sheets, submitting listings to the MLS, creating virtual tours, etc.?

Then you’ll want to look at your goals. Are you hoping to get things a bit more organized or is your primary goal to grow your business?

Choosing a real estate assistant means taking a closer look at your business and at your needs. It means having a sense of not just the short term goals that you have for your business, but also looking at where you want to be a year, three years or five or ten years from now.

Then, once you know what your needs are, it’s time to start looking at real estate assistants. The best thing that you can do is to talk with prospective assistants and to see whether or not you connect and whether or not that person you’re talking with can help you to reach those goals.

That may sound overly simplistic, but when you get right down to it, why would you want to work with a real estate assistant who won’t help you get from where you are to where you want to be?

No matter what your real estate business does – whether you’re a broker, you work exclusively with sellers or buyers or you offer a flat fee listing service – an online presence is important for getting the word out about what you do.

Here are 15 things that a real estate assistant can do to promote your services online:

1. Add listings to your company website
2. Update the content on your website – info for your clients, your company blog, or articles relevant to your business, press releases
3. Make sure that the links on your site are all functional
4. Create and enhance images on your website
5. Identify and register domains for your web presence
6. Uploading content for your website
7. Starting and managing a forum on your website
8. Starting and managing a blog on your site
9. Updating listing status and infomation
10. Create virtual tours to place on your website and other social networking sites
11. Submit listing information to Realtor.com
12. Find and add links to other sites that will benefit your clients
13. Use Dreamweaver or FrontPage to give your website a makeover
14. Create online forms for your website
15. Provide SEO services for your website

Whether your real estate assistant provides one or more or all of these web services, you can be sure that having someone “in the know” helps you (and your clients) to get the most out of your website