We recently sat down with Jamie from Ballarat Real Estate to hear how outsourcing with Affordable Staff has transformed their property management operations. With 18 years in the industry and now leading a team of 25 Property Managers across five offices in regional Victoria, Jamie knows the pressures of keeping processes efficient and clients happy.
In our chat, he shared why they explored outsourcing in the first place, how they overcame initial reservations, and the game-changing results they’ve seen since partnering with Affordable Staff.
Tell us about your background
I started with Real Estate back 18 years ago and always worked in Property Management. So I think over the years it’s been an exciting ride, an exciting journey. And I would really like just helping people on their property journey, particularly in the property management space.
Now I am Head of Operations and Head of Property Management. So I oversee a team of about 25 Property Managers, 5 office locations spread throughout regional Victoria with our main base in Ballarat.
I’d love to start and perhaps reflect back to when we first connected and started talking about Virtual Assistants.
What made you consider outsourcing?
I think for us having a network of 4 offices at the time, we’ve now got 5 was to have a centralised administration team to really help the back-end support from our Property management perspective and the ability of having an outsourced operation was a little bit appealing at the time, but not knowing a whole much about it, hence reaching out to you and learning more about how VAs and outsourcing would help us and our business.
What were your goals for Outsourcing?
The original goals in terms of being able to have a centralised outsourced team was really to look at efficiency and effectiveness of our Property Managers and having a very streamlined process to make sure that our Property Managers are well supported and getting continuity at every time of each step of the property management process. And really trying to breakdown those barriers that the team needed to get their job done quicker and faster because that’s what we knew our clients wanted and our clients needed. So we really wanted to enhance our client experience and the ease of access to do that was for us having a centralised team and that just happened to be here in the Philippines.
Why did you choose Affordable Staff?
Great question. I think one of the key things for us was, Data Security was absolutely paramount for us. So for us, it wasn’t just about making sure that it was a good fit for the team. It was very much about the data security had to come first. And some key things that really stood out to us was that all of the the VAs work from the office not allowing anyone to work from home. I think that can open up itself to some concerns in that perspective. But certainly having the team work from the office and the ISO compliance as well was a big aspect for us, which I think is unheard of in the marketplace.
Any initial reservations with outsourcing?
I think a lot of the reservations and concerns were about the language barrier and not being able to understand the team members properly or their English skills. And I think they’re coming on board quite easily and quite confidently. I can say 100% of our team are absolute advocates for having team members here in the Philippines because their English is incredible. It’s not what you would expect. The staff members that we’ve encountered through Affordable Staff are degree qualified, they go through a massive amounts of training to get through the testing phase to actually even be placed with an organisation.
Talking about VAs more recently, it’s about the high calibre of people that they are able to get through and place with clients, and we’re lucky to have that at this stage.
What have been the direct results through Outsourcing?
In terms of an increase in productivity for both our property managers, but more importantly our clients as well. We’re now able to make sure that we get particular tasks done far more quicker than what we would have had to have been able to do because these, our VA here are basically like we, I like to call them like specialised doctors.
So our property managers are like general practitioners and the VA is their specialist in lease renewals, they’re specialists in rent increases, they’re specialists in particular silos of the business. They know it in and out, potentially even far better than what some of the PMs in the marketplace, generally speaking, would know because they are so detailed of what they’re doing.
That then has allowed our property managers more time to be client-facing, to be in clients’ properties and helping them on their property journey.
What advice would you give to anybody at the early stages of considering outsourcing through Affordable Staff?
I think like anyone, people are naturally going to have maybe some apprehensions about using outsourcing. We did it purely to really improve our efficiency with our team and our clients and our renters and owners. People want information, they want things done immediately and to provide that to them. This was just an easy choice for us.
Looking to Learn More?
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