Most real estate agents hit a ceiling that has nothing to do with their market, skills, or work ethic. It has to do with how they spend their time. The agent answering emails, scheduling showings, chasing paperwork, and managing their own calendar will never have enough hours to build the business they are capable of building. The solution sounds simple: delegate. But delegation done wrong is often worse than no delegation at all, and most agents who have tried handing things off to a virtual assistant have a story about why it did not work.
Justin Nimergood, founder of Top Gun Team at Epique Realty in Southlake, Texas, took a different approach. He spent a full year training his own VA before making that resource available to a single agent on his team. Not a week. Not a month. A full year.
The standard approach to virtual assistant support in real estate is to point agents toward a staffing agency, let them pick someone from a roster, and hope for the best. The problem, as Nimergood sees it, is the level of training those assistants typically arrive with. “The level of training that a lot of these agencies get is very basic, very minimal,” he says. “They are task-oriented. High repetition, task-oriented things. And that is really offering very minimal lift in terms of the services they are providing.” What that means in practice is that agents end up with a VA who can do simple, repetitive work, but anything complex still lands back on the agent’s plate. The cognitive load does not actually decrease. The agent is still the bottleneck.
Nimergood wanted something categorically different. He wanted a VA capable of handling complex tasks, the kind that typically require judgment, context, and a deep understanding of how a high-performing real estate business actually operates. The only way to get that, he concluded, was to train the VA himself, from scratch, using his own systems and his own standards. “I trained him because only I can train him the way that I want to operate my business,” Nimergood says. “I knew in order to have the best VA supporting the best team, I had to take the time to hand-hold him and teach him everything. Basically everything that I do, or was doing, so that he could do it.” That process took a year. It required Nimergood to document his own workflows, articulate his standards clearly enough to teach them, and invest sustained time in someone who would not be generating a return on that investment for months. Most team leaders would not do that. Most team leaders also do not have a VA who can handle genuinely complex work.
The outcome Nimergood is describing is not incremental. It is structural. Once the VA was trained to handle the tasks that previously required Nimergood’s direct involvement, his available time shifted entirely. “Now, unlike a lot of people who are unfortunately unable to offload complex tasks, I can totally focus on high-level strategic, executive-level activities on a daily basis,” he says. “If it is not a commission-generating activity, I am focused at the highest level. That is where someone who is a team lead should be.” Commission-generating activities, in Nimergood’s framework, are the things only he can do: listing appointments, showings, negotiations, relationship-building conversations. Everything else that does not require his physical presence or his specific expertise is, by definition, delegable. And once the infrastructure exists to delegate it properly, every hour previously spent on administrative work becomes an hour available for the activities that actually grow the business.
The broader principle Nimergood is pointing to is one that applies well beyond virtual assistants. It is about how a team leader thinks about their time and what they are willing to invest to protect it. Building the infrastructure to properly delegate takes longer upfront than most people want to spend. It requires documenting processes, tolerating imperfect early execution, and resisting the temptation to just do it yourself because it is faster right now. Those short-term costs are real. The long-term cost of not doing it is the ceiling. The agents who figure this out earlier are the ones who scale. The ones who keep doing everything themselves stay busy, but they do not build anything.
