5 Big Mistakes Real Estate Investors Make When Hiring Freelancers

What are the most common mistakes real estate investors make when hiring and working with outsourced staff and freelancers? How can investors and real estate businesses recruit and wield these assets more profitably?

Outsourcing has become the way to run a business and hire today. It is very hard to remain competitive when maintaining an in-house staff today. However, this type of hiring and labor management is still new to many real estate CEOs and investors. How effective and profitable these freelancers prove to be in your organization depend a lot on how they are hired and allowed to work.

Watch out for these five common blunders and how to ace them instead…

Being too Vague or Detailed in Job Postings

Want to hire the best freelancers for your real estate business? Be wary of being too vague or too detailed upfront. Put yourself in the shoes and mind of a top freelancer. Experts are going to be looking for roles they have experience in. There’s a big difference between an SEO ‘expert’ and an online marketing professional with real estate SEO experience. If they don’t know this is a real estate gig, they are probably just going to pass or reject the offer. On the other end of the scale, the best are fielding multiple job offers and are browsing hundreds of job postings each day. They simply don’t have the time to read a book about the job description or jump through a lot of hoops. Make it easy for the best to apply. Then be very clear about the deliverables and role once you narrow down your short list of your top potential hires.

Not Prioritizing Value

When you are out there evaluating house deals price is irrelevant, right? This is especially true for flippers and property wholesalers using transactional funding. How much the property costs doesn’t matter. As long as the value and profit is there. The process is the same, but if you can make $200k flipping a million-dollar house, without using your own money to fund the deal, that’s better than doing the same amount of work to flip a $50k house and netting $10k, right?

So, when shopping freelancers, look for the value. For example; if one charges $80 an hour but can deliver the same results in one hour that a $20 an hour freelancer takes 6 hours to do, the one with the higher rate is actually cheaper and more profitable.

Failing to Fully Utilize Freelancer Assets

Freelance team members are assets. Yet, they are often sorely under-utilized. You don’t want to throw too much work on a team member that is outside their area of expertise. Even if they are good it can be counterproductive. Yet, make sure you are using each one you have to their maximum value. If they have more experience in one area than you do, listen and test their ideas. Then get out of your own way and let them do their best possible work.

Not Sharing Goals, Values and Milestone Objectives

It’s impossible for your team members of any type to help you reach your goals and to appropriately represent your brand and company values unless they know what they are. They are not mind readers. Make sure you share these critical factors and keep them visible.

Being Slow to Pay

Most freelancers work on a very short income and cash flow cycle. That is usually days or a week, versus how some real estate businesses try to stretch out invoices with other vendors for 30 or 90 days. They typically have a dozen plus clients at a time and are naturally going to do their best and prioritize work for those they know are going to pay and pay on time. Plus, it gets very expensive for them to chase down invoices. If you want fast, top notch work, be their best client.

Original posting at http://besttransactionfunding.com/index.php?option=com_easyblog&view=entry&id=417&Itemid=79