How a Real Estate Agent can increase their number of Broker Price Opinion assignments by hiring a Virtual Assistant
The current need for BPOs
Banks and other Lending Institutions are currently overwhelmed with a record number of properties needing Broker Price Opinions (BPOs). This is an opportunity for Real Estate Agents to increase their earnings by getting paid; usually within 30 days or earlier for their BPO services. It is an additional stream of income for agents since they do not have to depend on getting paid only when a property is sold. But accepting large number of BPO assignments can be a daunting task especially if you want to handle the entire process all by yourself. Is there a way to increase the number of BPO orders you accept while making sure that the quality of your work exceeds the expectations of the BPO companies? Before I answer that question let me explain what a BPO is for those who don’t already know.
What is a Broker Price Opinion?
A BPO is essentially a tool that is used by banks and lenders to quickly determine the value of a property without having to pay for a full blown appraisal. An agent is usually assigned the task of carrying out the BPO which can either be an exterior BPO that requires only the pictures of; the street, the street name, the address numerals, the front of the property, the side(s), the back and so on; typically pictures that can be taken without entering the property itself OR an interior BPO wherein pictures of the interior are required as well such as pictures of every room, repairs needed, mechanical parts – water heater, HVAC, sump pump and so on. These pictures are usually accompanied by additional information of three sold and three actively listed properties that are comparable to the subject properties. Agents are paid more for the interior BPOs than the exteriors; depending of the market area, agents can get paid between $30 on the low end to as high as $75 (and sometimes more).
How to increase your number of BPO assignment by using a Virtual Assistant (VA)
Registering with new BPO companies: A VA can help you get additional BPO assignments by taking over the time consuming task of signing up with new BPO companies. All you need to do is give the VA the required information and they will go ahead to fill out the application forms on your behalf. The competition between agents for BPOs is fierce; it can easily become a question of how badly do you want it and how quickly can you accept it. In order for you to get a sizeable and predictable number of BPO orders daily, then you need to be signed up with a lot of BPO companies.
Following up with BPO company contacts: A VA can help you follow up with key contacts at the BPO companies in order for you to get assigned BPOs. Most times these contacts will tell you that they are no longer looking for agents in your area or might just tell you to be patient and wait to be assigned a BPO. The solution is really to attempt to get them to assign you BPOs that are needed in a hurry – rushed BPOs or those that were previously assigned to other agents who for one reason or the other did not do a good job on it. The VA can call these contacts quite frequently using a script you design to ask for BPO Re-Assignments and rushed ordered BPOs. After helping these BPO companies with these kinds of BPOs you will become a much needed resource to them because they can depend on you to correctly turn in BPO that other agents dropped the ball on or BPOs that they need to get back immediately.
Entering time consuming BPO data: A VA can help you enter the BPO data into the system used by the BPO companies so that you do not have to spend time doing data entry. All you need to do is supply the VA with the comparable sold and actively listed properties in form of a Comparable Market Analysis (CMA), as well as the pictures of the subject property. Once the VA has completely entered in the data, you can then go back and quickly review the data and enter in the final comments to establish the value of the property. One of the reasons why using a VA to enter in the data is a great option is that you can keep track of what type of information each BPO company requires and essentially create a system for the VA to actually pull the data on their own without you having to actually pull the data yourself.
Taking pictures of the property: Okay this point has two sides to it because it depends on where the VA is located. If they are located in your state, you can actually train them on how to take the required pictures for the interior and exterior BPOs so that they go out and take the pictures themselves. In situations whereby they are not located in your state, they can help you find people to go out to take the pictures on your behalf by posting ads on online classifieds such as Craigslist, Kijiji and so on. In this economy folks are eager for a paying job, I suggest paying them $10 per property and also paying for their gas. The VA will then be responsible for coordinating the picture taking activities of these folks by letting them know the addresses for each property, the types of pictures required and when they are due back.
In essence, I have gone through various reasons why it makes sense to have a Virtual Assistant help you with your BPOs. It really boils down to the systems you have in place because if you have a good system for doing BPOs a VA can easily take on some of the task or all of it so as to free up time for you to work on getting more BPO orders while ensuring the quality of your work so that you do not lose your relationships with the BPO companies.
Owen: How a real estate agent can increase their number of broker price opinion assignments by hiring a virtual assistants. The current need for broker price opinions, also known as BPOs. Banks and lenders right now, overwhelmed with a record number of properties needing BPOs. Agents can use BPOs to supplement their income; it serves as an additional stream of income that essentially does not depend on the agent actually selling the property. Agents accepting too many BPOs can find it to be a difficult task especially they’re trying to handle all that many BPOs by themselves.
Before I go ahead and say the solution to that problem, let me go ahead and explain what a broker price opinion is, for those who don’t understand. Well, a broker price opinion is a tool that is used by lenders to determine the value of a property without them having to actually order a full blown appraisal. Real estate agents are usually the ones that go out and carry out the BPO orders. They are real estate agents that one that actually executes the BPOs. We have two types of BPOs. We have the exterior and the interior. The exterior really is the agent going out there and taking pictures of the outside of the property, the streets, the front of the house, the sides, even the address numerals, the street signs, anything that can be taken from the exterior of the property. Whereas the interior involve both the exterior and also the agent having to go into the property and taking all the rooms in the property, any kind or repair that is needed as well as the mechanical such as the electrical, the HVAC, sump pump and also maybe with the water heater, the lender usually wants to see that. So agents usually get paid for the interior BPOs than the exterior because it involves a lot more work and agents usually can earn between, depending on the type of BPO they’re doing and also on the market area, agents usually can earn between $30 to $75 and sometimes in some areas a lot more than that.
So how to increase your number of BPO assignments by using a virtual assistant? Well, a virtual assistant can help you with the registering or signing up with new BPO Company. So the virtual assistant basically gets all your information from you and goes ahead to start applying to a bunch of different company. The reason why we wanna do that is because the competition between agents for BPO right now is very serious. And it becomes a question of, if you only apply to maybe a handful of BPO companies and don’t do anything about applying for more BPO companies. Here now becomes a situation where you can ask yourself how badly do you wanna do BPOs and secondly how fast can you accept the BPOs. So in order to prevent that and make your BPOs, the number of BPOs you do daily more predictable and more sizeable, you need to have your VA go out and apply to as many BPO companies as possible so that at the end of the day, you’ll probably would have a bunch of different BPOs that will be assigned to you as a opposed to just if you only had applied to maybe one, two or three different BPO companies. But if you had your VA go out and apply to 50 plus BPO companies, there’s no reason why you wont have a huge number of BPO to each day.
You can have your virtual assistant follow up with the BPO companies. But when I say follow up, I mean, if your VA calls the company, usually, they would tell you, the key contacts at the BPO companies that signed the BPOs especially when you sign up newly they would tell you “Oh, we don’t need any other new agents in your area or just wait patiently to be assigned a BPO. But the trick is to be a lot more pro active than that and when the VAs call, make them ask for BPO reassignments. By that I mean, BPOs where other agents were assigned to, but those agents for one reason and the other were not able to get them done correctly. So now they have to reassign it to someone else. Or also ask for BPOs that need to be done immediately so you can just go ahead and do it. As supposed to looking for BPOs that is assigned to you and give you a number of days to get it back. And that was actually BPOs that either reassignments or BPO that they need to get done immediately. The reason why I say this is that you would create an impression in the minds of the BPO companies that they can come to you as the person who gets the job done especially when they need stuff done immediately or when someone else doesn’t get it done correctly. So you’re now the go to person and this would essentially increase the number of BPOs you have daily.
You can have your Virtual Assistant enter in the time consuming BPO data. Each BPO company has the system they use online wherein the data in terms of the pictures of the property and also the information of comparable property and information on comparable sold property or the information of the comparable actively listed property entered into their system. If you will to do it yourself, especially if you’re trying to increase the number of properties you’ll gonna be doing. Now, it becomes a time consuming situation. After taking the pictures, now you have to sit down and enter all those BPO data. Well, if you have a virtual assistant, all you have to do is handle only the comps, the comparable market analysis information to the virtual assistant and they take their time to enter in all those data. So now you can concentrate on doing a lot more BPOs and just hand the data to the virtual assistant and they enter it on your behalf.
Another thing to is over time as your virtual assistant works on different types of companies in your behalf, they would essentially create a system wherein they know what exactly each BPO company needs. And overtime can actually be trained on how to get that data without you having to supply that data. So essentially you’re taking out of yourself out of the equation for doing that task.
You can have your virtual assistant go out and take pictures of the property. There are two ways to look at it because if your virtual assistant is located in the same city or the same state, they can actually go out there by themselves in the morning and go out and take all the pictures and make come back in the evening and whatever, and then enter in the data. But if the virtual assistant is not located in the same state, in that case we will have a virtual assistant bas eon the Philippines. Obviously, they’re not gonna really take pictures for you. So what’s gonna happen now is, in that case we can have the virtual assistant help you find folks on the internet through Craigslist, Kijiji and all those sites to go out there and take the pictures for you. In this economy, people who don’t have jobs there, they are looking to make money. What I suggest is the VAs go onto those sites, put ads saying that they’re looking for to someone to take pictures and what I suggest is that you pay maybe $10 an hour for them to take a picture of the property and also pay for their gas. It becomes a worthwhile thing because the more BPOs you do, you don’t have to go out and take the pictures. The people can go out there as long as you trained them; they can go out there and take the pictures for you. Also, the virtual assistant if you use this suggestion, can actually coordinate the activities of those folks by daily telling them that ok “these are the addresses of the properties that we need to get BPOs done for today and these are the type of pictures we need for this property and this are the time that we need them back”.
So in conclusion, virtual assistants can handle your BPO tasks and the BPO orders that you have. It really boils down to you first of all having a system in place so that the virtual assistant can come in, take over the system which essentially frees your time so that you can work in getting even more BPOs that can be done effectively and efficiently so that you can try to meet the expectations of the BPO company, you don’t lose the relationship with them.
So what do you think? I’m sure that right now you after hearing what I just said, your mind is basically buzzing with the ideas on what you can have your virtual assistants do in regards to helping you with your broker price opinion.
Well, if you really need to hire a virtual assistant right now that’s been trained to handle broker price opinions, well we can help you with that. We can provide you with virtual assistant that can do that for you. All you have to do is go to the top of my blog and look for the flashing button that says “click here to hire your virtual assistant now” and click it. Well, I hope that you’ve enjoyed this video as much as I’ve enjoyed creating the video. Thank you.
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So what do you think? I am sure your mind is already buzzing with other ways a Virtual Assistant can help to increase the number of Broker Price Opinions you do. I will like to hear from you so leave your comments below.
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