Where To Hire Your Real Estate Virtual Assistant (3 Best Sites!) | The STRR Podcast #76

Everyone knows there's more people working from home than ever before. And in our short term rental businesses we can work with a lot of people virtually. We only really need a couple people on the ground. That's our housekeeping and our maintenance. So I want to talk about bringing on a virtual team this week on the Short Term Rental Riches podcast. Stay tuned. Welcome to Short Term Rental Riches. Quick actionable ideas to help you along your real estate investment journey, but with a specific focus on short term rentals. Happy you're here again as always. And another topic that I think will really help you with your short term rental business. We're talking about virtual assistants. And so there's a lot that goes into this. But as a short term rental operator, a lot of our operations, most of them in fact are virtual. Everything aside from housekeeping and maintenance and the physical property itself we can do virtually. And that's what we've been teaching on this show for the last year and a half now. And this week I wanted to break down where I look for virtual assistants. I recently just hired several more on that to come in the near future. But I want to break down where I look for them. And just a couple quick notes on hiring and finding your virtual assistant because if you don't already have one, man, they are such a help. It's an amazing team member and with the strength of our dollar, it can really help us with our costs. So I'm just going to tackle that point first because a lot of people feel bad about paying a low wage to a virtual assistant. A lot of virtual assistants, you know, we hire from two, three to five, six dollars an hour or higher. And that seems like a really low wage. In fact, that is a really low wage if you're living in the US for example. But, but we know that the value of our US dollar is much stronger than a lot of other currencies. And I want to just give you an example. I'm here in Brazil actually in my new apartment that I just got. I'm going to break that down in the future too. But there's a pool here. I have a private pool and I'm not the best. I've had pools before in the past. I'm not very good with all the pool chemicals and stuff like that. So I need someone to help me with the pool on a regular basis. So I found a pool guy and he charges 150 reais per month. That's to come once a week and that is a little less than $30 a month. Right now with the value of our US dollar, of course, these things always fluctuate. But if we're to compare that to California, for example, where. Which is where I had my last pool. This is years ago, I would say I was paying at least $150. And that's probably low. It's probably much more than that. But even then, that's five times the amount that I'm paying here. And this is the standard going wage. So if we were to pay a minimum wage, for example, like in the US$11 or $12, that would be really, really high, because the power, the strength of our dollar is really high. This is exactly why I've been living outside the US For a long time, why I love traveling, because we can go to these beau. We can eat in amazing restaurants at a fraction of the cost, not because it's cheap in the city that we're in, but because the value of our dollar. So on average, I think you could expect to find great virtual assistants anywhere from two or three dollars up to four, five, six, seven. I mean, you can go higher than that, but those are the averages. And there's a lot, a lot of talented people out there. I love my team that I'm working with, and it's really to just be able to build a team virtually. I work with people multiple time zones. I'm always, for the most part, in a different time zone, 5 or 6. I have virtual assistants in the States as well. So this just allows us to work with the best people, but also to watch our costs take advantage of the value of our dollar. So with that point aside, hopefully that made it a little more clear to you why we can get such good value when we look outside of where we're l. So with that point aside, where do we actually find our virtual assistants? And I work primarily with Filipino virtual assistants. I've just had great experience with them. I've been working with them for years. Some of the reasons why I like working with Filipinos is that they speak English. It's not their first language, but it's very commonly spoken. And a lot of them speak very, very fluently. And they use sort of the same kind of humor as we do in the western worlds like the US And Canada. And their accent is more similar than, say, South African or.

An Indian virtual assistant with an accent. So I found the language to be very, very good and similar. But on top of that, I found Filipinos just to be very nice, friendly, loyal, and honest people. And that's what allows us to grow as a business is loyalty and honesty. You know, those are huge up on my list. And my experience, all the Filipinos I've worked with have fit that very, very nice people to work with. So we talked about kind of the wage and what you could expect to pay a Filipino virtual assistant. Now, where do we find them? There's three places that I'm going to recommend. I've only used one of them, but the other two have come very highly recommended. I use onlinejobs Ph and one of the great things about it is that, well, with online jobs ph, and the other two that I'll recommend is that there's no middleman. So if you're looking for someone on upwork or fiverr, for example, you might be paying 20% to the middleman to upwork. And so that takes away from the amount of money that your virtual assistant's making, but it also costs you more. So I use onlinejobs ph. You can post a job online, you pay a monthly fee. When you find a virtual assistant, you can cancel your monthly fee. I believe right now it's $69. Of course, these things are always changing, but that is plenty of time to find virtual assistants. And you can find virtual assistants for anything. I've recently been looking specifically for guest reception, but. But you can find video editors, web developers, podcast editors, social media.

Administrative tasks, and email. Anything you can think of. We can pretty much do virtually these days. So I use onlinejobs ph. It's worked really well for me. But I've also been recommended a couple others. One is called BestJobs pH, and that is also a flat fee per position that you hire, somewhere under a hundred dollars. And then the third one, if you don't want to do the hiring yourself, this is a great option. And this is virtual stafffinder.com now, it will cost you in. Today's price is around $500. But what they're going to do is take your job description, which you need to make sure is exactly what you're looking for. But they're going to take that and they're going to do all the. The interviewing and all that for you, and they're gonna find three great candidates for you to pick from. Now, if you don't like any of the candidates or they don't work out, I believe they will find more for you. But this can save you a lot of time. So Those are the three that I've used online jobs, BestJobs PH and virtual staff Finder. We'll put a link in the show notes. And if you haven't yet, check out our new website. We've got a new website, striches.com we're putting all kinds of resources on there, but you can also go back and you can view all of these prior podcast episodes and you can search very easily. So check that out if you haven't. And if you haven't left us a review, of course, we'd really, really appreciate that too. So we talked about a potential wage that you could pay. Why I like working specifically with Filipinos three places where you can find them the last thing I want to cover today is just how long does it take to actually find a good candidate? Well, I believe it only takes a week. Yep, just one week. As long as your job description is accurate, that should be plenty of time to get some good candidates. If you're not finding good candidates, then something's off. You're either your job positions may be off the description, maybe the amount that you're trying to, or you're willing to pay for that position. Remember that each position can have varying wages too. They're not all the same, just like they're not all the same anywhere in the world. Take a look at other job postings and you can get a good accurate idea of what you might expect to pay and just a little more information on what you might want to include in your job posting. I'm going to go into this in more depth in the future because there's a lot of steps to this, right? But I just wanted to give you the top three places that I found and just bring up this idea again of having a virtual assistant because if you don't already.

It can make your life so much, so much easier. So check that out. I'm going to go into much more detail in the future about my new team, some of the things we're doing, and I'm really excited to share that with you. But until then, I hope you have a wonderful week and see you soon. Want to get on the fast track to financial freedom through short term rentals? Well, it all starts with the properties you acquire, but you want to make sure that you acquire the right properties. I want to give you my ebook that will show you how to do just that. There is no charge. It's my gift to you for being one of our subscribers. Just go to restmethods. Com, that's restmethods. Com.