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This article is presented by BELAY.
Real estate investing can be a great way to earn passive income, but it doesn’t mean you aren’t busy. As an investor, you’ve got to handle calls from tenants, potential buyers, and agents, as well as update your CRM.
These administrative tasks can be tedious and add up, especially as your portfolio grows. They could even potentially cost you your next big deal if you miss a call, are slow to follow up, or delay an offer.
As your real estate investments grow, keep track of how you’re spending your time. If you spend more time buried in paperwork, reports, and messages than making new deals and real estate offers, it might be time to reassess your time management and consider the help of an assistant.
Treat Your Hours Like You Treat Your Capital
Time is money. When you spend your hours scheduling showings, doing accounting, chasing contractors, or compiling data, that’s less time you’re spending on high-return activities like finding off-market real estate deals or raising capital.
Just like you would scrutinize your cap rates, cash flow, and ROI on a property, you should be doing the same for your time.
Spend a week calculating how you spend your days. Do you spend several hours a day answering emails? Do you find yourself on the phone a lot? Include all business-related work, like those administrative tasks, scrolling online, looking for new deals, or managing tenants.
You can use an Excel spreadsheet to track your time manually, or use a calculator tool like
BELAY’s free EA Task Calculator. Once you figure out where you spend your time, you can figure out where you can cut back and free up hours by delegating tasks.
Use the EA Task Calculator today to see how much time and money you’re leaving on the table.
Unlock Your Time Through Delegation
If it’s true that time is money, your hours become an asset that can appreciate in value when you delegate tasks. Having an assistant helps, but without clarity on which tasks you should be delegating, you might still be stuck working harder on your business than you should. It doesn’t help to have assistance if you end up doing more of the same work.
The Pareto Principle, or 80/20 rule, states that 80% of your results come from just 20% of your effort. If you apply that same rule to your real estate investing, that means only 20% of the time you spend working on deals creates 80% of your investment results.
Using that same rule, you can identify the tasks that generate the biggest return on your time: making deals, networking, and refining your investment strategies across your portfolio.
Then, delegate the low-value tasks like tracking leads or handling expenses to an assistant. You can start with these six T’s to figure out what tasks are taking the most amount of your time without giving you the most value:
1. Tiny: Small, seemingly inconsequential tasks that add up over time
2. Tedious: Simple but repetitive tasks like data entry or updating spreadsheets
3. Time-consuming: Complex tasks that are worth doing but are better handled by someone else who’s trained, like investment reports and analysis
4. Teachable: Work that seems difficult, but can be delegated with the right process
5. Terrible At: Tasks you’re weak at but others excel in, whether that’s answering emails or bookkeeping
6. Time-sensitive: Tasks that must be done quickly so you can focus on the bigger picture
If delegated correctly, hiring an assistant pays for itself, as it frees up your time to focus on the things that give you the biggest returns.
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Unlock More Deals by Hiring an Assistant
Hiring the right assistant to handle administrative tasks can significantly help you and your time management skills, giving you space to focus on those high-value, high-level tasks that are instrumental to your success as an investor. Having someone who is trained on the appropriate way to manage your inbox, update your CRM, prepare communication for deal inquiries, and conduct simple property research can help save you hours.
They could even help with scheduling, coordinating projects, booking travel, and managing vendors. A good assistant can also help with finances by handling expenses, invoices, and rent payments, analyze deal data, and run reports.
You can even delegate your marketing and personal tasks, such as posting to social media, sending out newsletters, compiling images, and sending out thank-you cards. And, heck, you might even be able to take that long-awaited vacation, since you’ll have someone trained who can cover for you.
Having clear processes that your assistant can follow can really help loosen the strain of your business and free up your brain to focus on more important tasks.
Final Thoughts
Make your money work for you by investing your time where it earns you the highest return, and delegate the rest. By delegating time-consuming tasks, you can close more deals, potentially hit your financial goals sooner, and free your brain to avoid burnout in your work.
Find out how BELAY can match you with a U.S.-based assistant who understands the operations of real estate so you can free up your time. Pay only for the hours you need, and get immediate leverage.
