How Much Does a Real Estate Virtual Assistant Cost? (2026 Rates)

A dedicated Filipino real estate VA costs about $7 to $12 per hour. A US-based real estate assistant costs $22 to $40. A real estate VA agency will quote you $1,500 to $3,500 a month, frequently for shared support, which in an industry built entirely on relationships is a strange thing to buy.

This guide gives you the real numbers, explains what moves the rate, covers the costs nobody quotes, and is honest about the arithmetic that makes this one of the easiest hires in any industry to justify. VA Masters has placed 1,000+ virtual assistants, including many working with individual agents, teams, and brokerages across the US, Canada, and Australia, so these figures come from roles we have actually filled.

The Short Answer

A dedicated real estate VA through VA Masters costs $7 to $12 per hour, which is up to 80 percent less than an equivalent US hire. For a full-time role that is roughly $1,200 to $2,000 a month, with no recruitment fee and no setup fee.

The range exists because real estate VA covers everything from data entry to owning the follow-up on every lead you have ever generated. The second of those is worth a very great deal more than the first, and it costs about four dollars an hour more.

The number that matters is not the hourly rate. It is your average commission. A VA who recovers one additional deal a year has paid for themselves several times over, and that is not an optimistic scenario, it is roughly what happens when someone actually works your database.

What You Pay by Region

Here is the same role, priced across the markets businesses actually hire from. These are typical market ranges rather than firm quotes, and they do move over time, but the overall shape of the picture is stable across years and it is the shape that matters far more than any individual figure in it.

The agency row is where most agents get this wrong. Shared support means the person handling your leads today may not be the person handling them next week, which means nobody ever learns your market, your clients, or the fact that a particular seller always wants a call rather than an email. In an industry where the entire product is relationship and follow-up, buying shared capacity is close to a contradiction in terms.

What Actually Drives the Price

Six things move the number, and follow-up ownership is the biggest of them.

**Lead follow-up.** Data entry and MLS work sits at the bottom of the range. Owning follow-up on every lead, working the database, and calling people back until they answer sits at the top, because it is the only part of the job that directly produces commissions.

**Transaction coordination.** Chasing lenders, inspectors, title, and clients to keep a deal moving is skilled work, and getting it wrong costs a closing rather than an afternoon.

**Calling.** A VA who will pick up the phone and work expired listings, FSBOs, and your cold database is worth substantially more than one who only handles email, and the willingness is rarer than the skill.

**CRM fluency.** Follow Up Boss, kvCORE, or Sierra experience shortens ramp-up and means the database actually gets used rather than merely populated.

**Marketing.** Listing marketing, social content, and email campaigns broaden the role and raise the rate, and they are usually the first thing agents drop when busy.

**How you hire.** An agency sells shared capacity at a monthly rate. A marketplace sells the lowest rate and you screen. Recruitment gives you a dedicated person who learns your market and your clients.

Pricing Models, and Which One Suits You

There are four ways this role is normally bought, and they are priced on completely different logic. Comparing their headline numbers directly is a category error, and it is the reason so many businesses feel they were quoted wildly inconsistent prices for what they assumed was the same thing.

**Hourly, dedicated.** You pay for a set number of hours from one person who works only for you. Transparent, flexible, and the model we use, because it is the only one where you can see exactly what you are paying for.

**Monthly retainer.** A fixed fee for a defined package of hours or deliverables. Simple to budget, and it usually costs more per hour than it appears once you divide it out, which is rather the point of the packaging.

**Per task or per project.** Suits genuinely one-off work. Poorly suited to anything ongoing, because you will spend more time scoping and pricing each task than the task was worth.

**Marketplace or freelance.** The cheapest headline rate available and the one with by far the highest variance. You are doing the screening yourself, and the cost of getting that wrong is not on the invoice but it is very real.

The distinction people miss is between buying hours and buying a person. A marketplace sells you hours, and hours are interchangeable. A dedicated hire gives you someone who accumulates knowledge of your business month after month, and that accumulation is the entire reason the arrangement gets better over time rather than staying flat. It does not show up in a rate comparison, and it is the largest single difference between the models.

Retainers deserve one further word of caution, because the packaging is genuinely persuasive. A monthly fee feels simpler than an hourly rate, and it removes the mild anxiety of watching a timer. What it also removes is your ability to see what you are buying. Divide any retainer by the hours actually delivered and the effective rate is usually a good deal higher than you assumed, which is not dishonest but is precisely why the packaging exists.

Agency, Freelancer, or Recruitment?

These three routes are frequently discussed as though they were price points on the same product. They are not. They are different products, and the price difference reflects what is included rather than what is delivered.

An agency sells you a managed outcome. They screen, they supervise, they replace people, and they carry the risk of things going wrong. That is real value and it is priced accordingly, generally at a substantial multiple of the underlying labor cost. If you want to be entirely hands-off and you are willing to pay for it, an agency is a defensible purchase.

A freelance marketplace sells you access and nothing else. The rate is the lowest available, the screening is entirely yours, and the variance in quality is enormous. Plenty of people have found excellent long-term help this way. Plenty of others have burned three months and two hires discovering that they are not good at screening, which is not a character flaw, it is simply a skill they had no reason to have.

Recruitment, which is what we do, sits between them and is frequently misunderstood. You pay a normal hourly rate for the person, and somebody else has already narrowed a thousand applicants down to the two or three worth your time. You get a dedicated person rather than shared capacity, you manage them directly rather than through an account manager, and you are not paying an ongoing margin for supervision you did not ask for.

The Hidden Costs Nobody Quotes

The hourly rate is the number everyone compares. It is rarely the number that decides whether the hire was a good one, and treating it as though it were is how businesses end up with a cheap arrangement that costs them a fortune.

**The leads you never followed up.** By an enormous margin the largest cost in this industry, and it appears nowhere. Most agents have hundreds of leads sitting untouched in a CRM, each one representing a commission that was paid for and never collected.

**Speed to lead.** A lead contacted within five minutes converts at a vastly higher rate than one contacted the next morning. Every agent knows this and almost none of them can actually do it, because they were showing a house. A VA can.

**Deals that fall apart.** A transaction that collapses because nobody chased the lender costs you an entire commission. The cost of a VA for a year is a fraction of one such deal.

**Your prospecting hours.** Every hour you spend on paperwork is an hour not spent in front of a client, and in this industry that is the most expensive substitution available.

I had eleven hundred leads sitting in a CRM I had not opened in a year, and I knew it, and I did nothing about it because I was busy. My VA worked that database for three months and pulled two closings out of it, from people who had already raised their hand and been ignored. That paid for her for several years. The savings are substantial but that is not the story. The story is the money that was already there.

Ari

Broker

★★★★★

What You Actually Get at Each Price Point

Rates within the Philippines vary for real and legible reasons, and understanding what sits behind each band stops you from either overpaying for capability you will not use or buying a disappointment you will have to replace.

What to Ask Before You Pay Anyone

Whichever route you choose, these questions separate a real quote from a number designed to get you onto a call.

When It Actually Pays Back

The arithmetic in real estate is the most lopsided in any industry we recruit for, which is why the resistance to this hire is so puzzling.

Take your average commission. A dedicated VA costs roughly $1,200 to $2,000 a month, or somewhere around $18,000 to $24,000 a year. If that VA is responsible for one additional closing a year, in most markets they have paid for themselves entirely, and frequently several times over.

One additional closing is not an ambitious target. It is roughly what happens when somebody answers your leads in five minutes instead of the next morning, and works a database you have not touched. Agents who hire properly do not report one additional deal, they report several, and the constraint on their business stops being follow-up and becomes their own capacity to be in front of people.

The honest caveat: if you are not generating leads, a VA cannot follow up on nothing. A VA is a multiplier on lead flow, not a source of it. If your problem is that nobody knows who you are, spend the money on that first, and we would rather say so than take it for a role that has nothing to work with.

How VA Masters Recruits for This Role

VA Masters is a boutique recruitment agency, not a marketplace. Every role runs through our 6-stage process, which narrows 1,000+ applicants down to the 2 to 3 best candidates you actually meet and choose between.

The stage that matters most here is the custom skills test, and the part that matters is the lukewarm lead. We give candidates someone who is polite, non-committal, and clearly hoping to be left alone, and we watch how many times they follow up. In this industry the money is almost never in the first call, it is in the eighth, and the willingness to make the eighth call without becoming irritating is a genuinely rare quality that no resume has ever managed to convey.

What Our Clients Say

Ari

Broker

★★★★★

She pulled two closings out of a database I had ignored for a year. The money was already there.

Ori

Team Lead

★★★★★

Every lead answered in minutes, not the next morning. She comes with ideas of her own and catches issues early.

Tiffany

Operations Manager

★★★★★

She keeps every transaction moving. She doesn’t just execute, she comes with ideas.

Real Messages from Real Clients

Common Costing Mistakes

These are the mistakes we see most often, and every one of them is avoidable.

How to Budget for This Properly

Work out the hours the role genuinely needs before you look at any rate. Most businesses either overestimate, and buy full-time capacity for part-time work, or underestimate wildly and then wonder why the person is permanently behind.

Then budget for the first month separately. Onboarding takes your time, and the person will not be at full productivity immediately, exactly as a local hire would not be. Nobody quotes this and everybody experiences it, and the businesses that plan for it consistently report a far better first quarter than the ones who were quietly hoping it would not apply to them.

And decide in advance what a good outcome looks like in numbers. If you cannot say what the role should produce, you will not be able to tell whether it did, and you will end up judging the hire on how busy they seemed, which is the worst available proxy for whether they were useful.

One more piece of budgeting discipline, and it is the one almost nobody applies. Run the three-year number, not the monthly one. A hire who stays three years costs you one onboarding. A hire who leaves twice in that period costs you three, plus two gaps in coverage, plus everything the departing people knew about your business and took with them. Over any realistic horizon, retention swamps the hourly rate as a determinant of what this actually cost you, and it is the variable nobody puts on the comparison sheet because it is the one they cannot promise.

Why VA Masters Prices This Way

VA Masters has placed 1,000+ Filipino virtual assistants with businesses across the US, UK, Australia, Canada, and Europe. Our rate is a single transparent hourly figure, with no recruitment fee, no setup fee, no platform charge, and no minimum term.

We are deliberate about that structure, because most of the pricing complexity in this market exists to obscure something. Recruitment fees front-load your risk before you have met anyone. Setup fees charge you for work that has not happened yet. Minimum terms exist so that the provider is protected if the match is poor, which is a strange thing to protect the provider from. We took all of it out, which means we only make money if the person we found is someone you actually want to keep.

The reason we can price this way is not a trick. A capable professional in the Philippines earns a fraction of a US equivalent, and we pay above the local market rather than below it, which is why our people stay long enough to know your clients by name.

And we recruit for persistence specifically, because in real estate that is the whole job. Someone who calls once and stops is worthless in this industry, however pleasant they are. Someone who calls eight times, warmly, and gets an answer on the eighth, will change your business, and finding that person is what our process is designed to do.

Happy VAs Cost You Less Over Time

The most expensive VA is the one who leaves in month four, because you pay the onboarding cost twice and lose everything they learned about your business in between. That is why VA Masters invests in fair pay, training, and real support.

This is not a values statement dressed up as an argument, it is the argument. Providers who pay at the very bottom of the market have high turnover, and their clients absorb that turnover as repeated onboarding, repeated ramp-up, and repeated loss of accumulated knowledge. The headline rate looked cheaper and the three-year cost was not. Happy, stable VAs stay longer, which is not a soft benefit, it is the single largest determinant of what this actually costs you. Here is how our VAs rate the experience.

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