The real estate industry has been around for more than fifty years in the United States. The arrival of the virtual assistant and the VA industry occurred in the 1990s and has experienced a steady growth every year since its inception and is expected to continue growing at a steady rate. There has been a significant increase in the numbers of individuals choosing to start privately owned VA practices as an alternative to the uncertainty of conditions in the workforce today such as company downsizing and the outsourcing of jobs to the cheaper labor markets in other countries.

A virtual assistant is an individual who agents outsource some work and projects to that would require an agent to spend many hours in an office to complete, when an agent needs to be outside the office working with clients, vendors, contractors, and others in order to be a successful professional. Some of that work includes maintaining client files, online transaction coordination, receiving faxes, creating reports, developing and managing email and other marketing campaigns, and even website designing, among other general office work that agents often find themselves too busy to handle themselves.

The internet has impacted how transacting is done today. The internet allows fast downloading and printing of important reports such as listings, industry projections, market indicators, and much more. This has created a wealth of information that is available for the agent to use in their conducting of transactions, and provides consumers with more detailed information than what was easily available to them before. Setting up different programs to gather and organize this information takes some time and for this reason, many agents today will outsource such work to a virtual assistant.

This is an interesting tidbit provided by the information that virtual assistants taking an anonymous internet poll shared. Over 90 percent of those who are working as a VA are women. Rising child care costs, the desire to work from home, high income potential, and spending more time with family were the most often given responses for why to choose to open a VA work at home business. Another question in this anonymous polling of virtual assistants asked respondents to share how much income they make yearly working as an assistant. An averaging of the responses showed that the annual gross income of a virtual assistant is around $29,000, with some making more than $200,000 in annual gross income.

The future looks bright for the virtual assistant industry. As the internet evolves in what its technology will allow the agent to do, so will the demand for virtual assistants as more realtors will find the need to outsource the tracking, organizing, maintaining, and compiling of this new information into reports they can use, to the professional VA.