Cold Caller Virtual Assistants for Real Estate; A Case Study

I think you can hire virtual assistants to do almost anything.

Hello and welcome to this case study about using online Filipino specialists in a real estate business. Today we have Josh Hines with us who runs the Impact Home Team real estate investment company in Baltimore, Maryland. He also does real estate coaching through his Facebook group, the Lead Gen Underground. In this case study, Josh and Shalane talk about how Josh got started in real estate and how online Filipino specialists really changed the direction of his career. They also cover an extensive list of what real estate agents can outsource to online Filipino specialists. So here's Josh Hines and Shalane Tuttle. Let's get into it.

I mean, so my business that you're obviously real estate investor, we do a lot of wholesaling. We're in the mid Atlantic here in Maryland. I basically got started from cold calling and my mind was really blown about six years ago when I I found out about Mojo Dialer and I found out you could buy a list of all the vacant houses. So I really started with my cell phone and just like driving for dollars and finding vacant houses. And then when I found out you could buy the whole list and then put it into like a dialer and hit go and just rotate through that was like life changing for me. So, you know, got into my own first deal doing that and basically my wife came back and heard me. I dialed every day from like 4 to 6pm and one day, basically she was like, you can pick up the phone and pull out these deals for like 20,000 or more dollars. Like, why don't you quit your job? And I was like, quit my job? What do you mean? We have our second kid on the way. This is like nuts who does that? And she's like, you should do it. And so anyway, I ended up doing it. And then I really didn't know what to do next besides just make cold calls, right? So I had done one deal and sold one deal and I didn't know what else to do. So I was just like, I need to hire some other cold callers because that's what I'm good at. And so if we can have more cold callers, then we can probably grow our business, right? I had no idea where to hire. And truthfully, I couldn't afford to hire anyone here in the US and so I had read the Four Hour Workweek with Tim Ferriss and he talks about scaling your time and getting more of your time back. And one of the ways that he talked about doing it was through virtual assistants. And that sounded as foreign and exotic. To me when I heard it, as it probably does to our parents or our aunts and uncles, right People of their age. I think the term virtual assistant has become mainstream now for us entrepreneurs and real estate investors. But a lot of other people have no idea that you can hire the services and time of other people around the world. And so long story short, it was, you know, I hired my. I don't even know how I found onlinejobs ph I would just assume a Google search. And I arrived and I don't even think I paid for my first like job listing or whatever. But you know, I started getting some applicants and then said hey, why don't you upgrade? And I upgraded and I got way more applicants and I think probably the first week in I had my first virtual assistant calling people and that was just. It opened my eyes to what is possible in that, you know, this is my business, I shouldn't be everything to everybody. So my mind was just blown with possibilities there at the very beginning. So for my first virtual assistant came from onlinejobs Ph, just from an ad that I wrote and it's a resource that I've continued to use over the years.

So how many virtual assistants do you have working for you right now?

I think we have six right now.

Two virtual assistant cold callers. That is outbound lead generation. So we're giving them big long list of prospects, vacant houses of you know, free and clear houses, people who are older. All these kind of lists list that real estate investors pull. That's who they're cold calling for us. So we have two of those. We have one outbound SMS specialist so just texting people all day long. We have two follow up specialists. So they're calling all of our leads that are already in our CRM. So they're just calling them and finding out if now is the right time to buy and what kind of information we can get from them to qualify that lead. So we have two of them. I have my personal assistant who's based in the Philippines and he just does a lot of marketing work for me and some transaction stuff. And I actually have more than six. We have eight because I have. My most recent addition was a marketing assistant who's gonna help clean and scrub and upload and deploy all of our marketing lists. And then about three months ago I hired a social media coordinator and video editor. So all she does full time for me is take videos like this and edit them down and make them into Instagram content, YouTube content and all that kind of stuff. So we actually had eight virtual assistants working for us currently.

If you were to advise someone in the real estate business, you know, you need a VA to do this one thing, what would you say?

For me in my business that's easy, it's the cold callers. Because that's what I was good at. And so that's what I kept doing because I kept saying, well, I'm making money so I should still be doing it well, then I realized if I had cold callers and they just passed me the leads and I could talk to all the leads and make the offers, well then my time was even more valuable. So for anyone starting out, even my coaching students, all about making sure that you have one channel nailed, one marketing channel, and usually for what I recommend is cold calling. So definitely a VA to start your cold calling and outbound lead generation.

What are the other time consuming tasks that you feel like are best invested into a VA and their abilities?

Anything that is repeatable. It gets a little hairier when you have to make more intimate decisions that have an impact for things on the rest of your company. But if it's something that's repeatable with a process and scalable, I think you can hire virtual assistants to do almost anything. So that's really important when you are attracting talent for any position. You have to know who you're looking for, what they should be good at, what kind of prior jobs they've had, Just certain things like that. I think anything as long as there's a process. And for us it's like making a screen sharing video. So I will go through my CRM and ask one of our assistants to do something and I just make a screen capture video and send it to them. Just say, let me know if anything's unclear. But most of the time they can take that video and repeat, repeat, repeat over and over again, which makes it very easy to outsource.

So can you tell us how you attract with these job posts, how you attract the right people and then how you whittle them down to find that right person for you?

Yeah, this is good. This is really important. And I only found this process through doing it over and over again. So let me talk about like the wrong way first so that I can contrast it. But the wrong way is putting just a very straightforward job description. We're seeking another team member to make cold calls on an hourly basis and you'll be paid $4 an hour. That kind of language is the beginning of the wrong way. And then the next wrong thing to do would be to Try to answer every application that came back in, especially if you're trying to hop on a Skype or a phone call or something with them right away. So I do not do any of those things. It starts with the job post. And the job post should convey some of your values of yourself or your company and so the things that are important to you. Right? And so some of the things that we value are moving at a fast pace, having a high impact, wanting to grow personally and helping other people. And so we craft that into the language at the very top and just say we're seeking someone who is boom in the very first part of the job description. If this sounds like you read on. And so then we say we're a US based real estate company growing fast and we're seeking blah, blah, blah, with a few points. We're seeking someone who's capable of doing these things. And we'll go into the, you know, the job description and the responsibilities. But then at the bottom, another key part is we say, to be considered for this position, please write us one line on why you're qualified and write us another line on what pay you want. And that's all. And there's only about 10% of the applicants overall who will do that. So that's the first sort of hoop that we make applicants jump through. And, you know, if they can't read all the way through a short job post, are those the kind of people that we want handling the small details of our job? Probably not. So I make it a very hooky ad that makes them want to read on and it gives them just a very small hoop to jump through. We'll have 50 to 70 applicants within the first three days, and most of those come in the first 12 hours. Out of those 50 to 70, I will probably have 10 or 12 who have done what I ask in that application. So then that 10 to 12 I will take. And I have an automated text that goes out next and it just says, thanks so much for applying. We really look forward to speaking with you before we get on to the next round. Here's the please go watch this video on YouTube and it's me sitting here like this saying, hey, congratulations, you made it to the next round. We're very excited to talk to you in order to see if you're qualified for this position, I need you to do this. And I read a script and I give them the URL for the script. Take as much time as you want and please read it for me back. If you send it in an audio format. Fantastic. But if you really want to jump to the front of the line in the hiring process, make a video of yourself saying the script. And so then I'll get applicants back. And I really don't prioritize if someone does video or not, but it shows me they're a little more outgoing. I probably cut that in half at this stage. Probably half will reply and then, you know, with that other half that doesn't reply, probably half of those say I'm going to do it but just never do. And then the other half, I never hear back from them. And from that five or six, usually I'll think two to four are super candidate. Right? They could definitely check off this box. And so I'll ask them like I'll connect with them on a message and ask them one thing and then ask them to set up a time, just do a five or ten minute check like on Skype. So really I've taken it from usually I would say my average ad performance. Oh, let me back up to the beginning. I'll also take that same ad that I do, copy the ad and put a new headline on it. So I'll have two ads attracting the same exact talent pool. So in the first 72 hours I'll kill the loser. I'll take away the one. One will have 50 applicants and one will have three applicants. I will take off the one that has three applicants and I'll do it again with a different headline, slightly tweaked or slightly tweak something in the body of the text and the track. I'm trying to get two super ads going to give me 30 or 50 applicants each because it is a numbers game. Get 50 applicants, I'll get 10 to 12 people that fly the right way. And then I will get, you know, I'll get three to five that send me the video and I'll have my two to four whittled down for interviews. And I can do that all within one week. I'll have go from 50 applicants down to my two or three that I want to schedule for a 10 minute talk. Right. But I'll do that with a few ads. So hopefully I'm talking three to five people total for one job position inside of a week that will be successful for us.

So outside of English, what would you say are your 1 to 3 most important attributes that you look for in.

A candidate in the Philippines? They do tend to be shy and standoffish. And so I want someone who can be a little bit more boisterous. So When I'm talking to them, I don't want someone that is just going to answer the questions very shortly. I want them to know that it's a two way street of communication. So I'm looking for someone who will ask me questions and speak up about something. And so that's a quality, especially in the roles that I'm hiring for. Let's face it, sometimes you're going to need to interrupt people or ask for clarification, or if they tell you no, you're going to politely need to circle back to it and ask them the question again. So being a little more boisterous I think is an important quality just specifically for what we're doing for telecommunications skills. I think another one that I've come to find over time is reliability. Because, and I asked this about past jobs. Tell me a time when your boss knew they could count on you or tell me a time where you went above and beyond to be like a great team player. Because let's also face in the Philippines, they lose power. And some people that I've talked to will take advantage of that and say, oh, I lost power, I can't work today where other people will drive to the local cafe and get wi fi. So reliability, being committed too, those are very important. I would say someone who wants more than just the role, they're ambitious. They want the role for now, but they don't want to do the role forever. So the people that I hire to cold call in the future, I want them to move up and be a follow up specialist for me who work closely with the people in our office. So I want people who are like, hey, if I do this, what are the next steps? Can we talk about a raise? Can we talk about a bonus? I want the people who are not content just to, to work in that box and report to the job every day and turn in the minimum requirements. So I'm definitely looking for someone who seems ambitious even here. I've come to find this out too, especially the ones that ask for more money than I think I'm willing to pay. I found that to be a good trait when I hire someone or when I'm interviewing someone and I advertise it for. I'll usually advertise for four to $10 an hour plus base. And I want the people, I find it to be true that a lot of the good ones will say, well, my last job I got paid $8, but I really want $10 an hour because I'm worth it. And here's why. People will come back. And it's very few and far between because again, the Filipino people are kind of standoffish and non confrontational. But my video editor was like that. I asked, I said, can I pay you $750 an hour? And she said, no, I really think I need 10 because I know I'm worth it. I've worked with so and so and so and so and I think the results are pretty good. And I said, you know what, I'm not going to bargain you now. I'm not going to give you $10 an hour. That's no problem. So those are the three I think that have led us to success so far.

How do you manage? What kind of like software do you use, what kind of communication systems do you use? And how do you stay linked to your team where you've got thousands of miles between you?

It's really crazy because there's a lot of people that use a lot of high tech and we have a lot of different tools per se. So we have a dialer and we have our CRM, the things to look up, properties about the values and such. But really with communication, it's all over Skype. It's all over Skype. And for some reason that really took off in the Philippines. Everyone has Skype over there. It's free. And so we're always using the chat feature to send leads back and forth as well as our CRM. But we communicate with a virtual assistant team every single day, usually in the chat. And then once a week we'll do a video huddle. So it was actually just this morning for about a half an hour. It's my two follow up specialists, myself, my partner, and then two guys here in the office. And they're on screen so they can see the rest of everyone in our office. And so our teammates are saying, hey Chris, I had this feedback before when you said this next time can you try this? And so I bring them in for just a little slice of what it's like to be here in the office. But I think that goes a long way. So Skype mainly. But we bring them in to make them feel like a part of the team and we make them feel like what they do is valuable.

Anything with working with Filipino vas that you need to tell your people right now, you know, this is what you need to avoid, this is what you shouldn't do. And learn from my mistakes.

I would preface this by saying that probably everything that I've done mistakenly was probably my fault. It wasn't anyone else's fault. Even though I hired them, it was probably my fault, right? But I would say again, the Filipino people are very shy. And if you say, can you do this most of the time? They'll say, yeah, I can do that. And so very early on, I probably hired a few of the wrong people. And they weren't bad people by any means. They were very nice to me. But you could just tell it wasn't their sweet spot for what I had them doing. And so I remember a few really.

Funny conversations that they had. One girl that I had before was talking about the house and she asked what kind of roof they had and.

They said they didn't know.

And she said, was it a bamboo roof? And you know, it's not a thing here in the US And I don't know, I didn't train her well enough. She shouldn't have been in that position. But it wasn't detrimental. It was just something that people can learn from. So definitely know what kind of user, know what kind of personality profile you should be aiming for when you're hiring a cold caller versus an admin assistant. And then you can start to screen for those things. But if you're just throwing it out there, I'm looking for a cold caller. And you assume that all candidates are equal without really testing them and putting them through the wringer a little bit, the results might not be so good.

Basically, anything that can be done on a computer and anything you can train them to do, qualified Filipino VA can just rock out of the water. Some of the things that I've talked to other people about and that we've gotten feedback about are scheduling and managing your appointments, managing your posts, your listing and listings, including like on mls, Zillow, whatever platform you're using. Video marketing, which I know is becoming a really big deal in the marketing section of real estate, that they can help create, edit and post videos. Contract creating and maintaining your CRM, email marketing, direct mail marketing, even categorizing and soliciting feedback from buyers and people that you've interacted with, coordinating showings and open houses. Your social media management, which is something you mentioned, you do bookkeeping and finances, helping you prospect FSBOs, maintaining electric filing systems and general data entry, cold calling, ordering supplies, anything on the phones that has to do with customer service, researching properties, which can be crazy time consuming, creating brochures and marketing materials, creating and maintaining your websites, your mailing list, maintenance, creating and sending out monthly newsletters, onlinejobs.ph.

Is I think of it kind of.

As like The Filipino Craigslist. Honestly, it's like a job board, right? Where you can just post and then the people come back to you. It just the unbelievable amount of applicants you can get from one or two job postings really opens up the possibility. So when you get good at attracting and then screening, you can get a lot better at hiring the right person. So I think just the sheer number of applicants, I've been able to get one or two or three days for some new job posts that I just came up with because I had a new idea. You can have someone to plug into that role within three or four days if you want to, a budget you can really afford. And I used to think of it a little bit differently until I asked one of my VAs, if you didn't have a job with me, what would you do? And he said, honestly, we would either telecommute about an hour and a half to go work in the BPO industry for AT&T or Chase bank or something like that. So an hour and a half and the pay is between six and eight dollars a day per day, or we're construction in my hometown and that pays a little bit better. That's like eight or nine dollars a day. And so for my guys now I'm paying between six and ten dollars an hour, which means they're getting eight times the normal salary that someone in their neighborhood is getting by working local. So I used to think of it as like, wow, I'm only paying them $3 an hour. How can they afford that? But the truth is, if you're paying them a decent wage, you're paying them far more than they could ever get. So you're helping them grow. And they really have helped me grow in my business. So that's really why I wanted to talk to you today. Just because it was your specific site, the product that you offer helped us get off the ground and help take it to the next level as well. So this has been super enjoyable.

Likewise. Thank you so much for your time.

Absolutely.