All Forum Posts by: Tyler Lanners

Hey Robert, would love to connect and talk about this some more. We use VAs within our own private equity and property management firm, doing the tasks you have listed above.

Interesting approach and great outcome! Our private equity is doing a lot of flips in and around the Chicagoland area, transacting about $20 mil a year (including the rentals we buy/sell). We could look into teaming up on some deals. Let me know.

Hey Valerie,

I'm a little late to the party here, but our private equity handles all of our bookkeeping overseas. In the Philippines they actually have the same accounting practices, and a lot of the bookkeepers over there have experience working with US-based companies already. If your mother is going to be the primary bookkeeper, then I would definitely hand off the grunt work to a qualified virtual assistant who you would pay about a lot less than someone working in the US to do the same quality of work.

Hey Wilson,

Speaking from experience, our private equity firm was originally using third party property managers to look after our 20+ units. We were thinking the same thing you were and decided to bring that part of the operation in house with a small team: a couple PM's, an accountant, and a small construction crew. There's obviously a lot of smaller tasks that needed to be handled (maintenance coordination, leasing coordination, administrative work), so for those jobs we outsourced to VAs.

After trying out a few different companies with the same lackluster results, our CEO wound up starting his own VA company that focuses on finding quality VAs, developing streamlined processes and systems, and properly training the VAs. 4 years later and we've since 20X'd our portfolio and greatly improved our bottom line, now owning and managing 400+ units. We still have a small team in-house, but we're never overwhelmed because of the help from our virtual assistants.

Let me know if you're interested in bringing your PM in-house and I'd be more than happy to let you know what steps we took for our firm.

Hey Brendon,

Fellow military man here! Our company was in a similar situation to yours a few years back. I work for a private equity firm that owned about 20 units four years ago. Our CEO decided to bring prop management in-house simply to improve our bottom line, and since then have 20X'd the firm to a little over 400 units in Chicago. 

The only way we've been able to do that is through really good SOPs and outsourced virtual staffing. We have a pretty small team in Chicago, about 3 property managers, a small team for construction/maintenance, 1 accountant, and our CEO mainly handles acquisitions. The rest is all outsourced, and we have a team of about 4 virtual assistants that cover roles varying from administrative and accounting to conducting research for acquisitions. Overall, we've all had a significantly reduced workload, so we've been able to focus on bigger picture items.

The biggest piece of advice that I could give you is to make sure your systems, technology, and SOPs are all solid and streamlined as much as possible. Whether or not you decide to outsource, you're definitely going to want to make sure that your entire operation is documented so there's no questions between your employees when certain scenarios come up.

I don't want to write a whole novel here haha, but let me know if you'd want to talk about developing/streamlining your processes or virtual staffing. I'd be happy to help!

Good luck!