Most real estate agents hit a ceiling that has nothing to do with their market, skills, or work ethic—it’s about what they spend their time on. Answering emails, scheduling showings, chasing paperwork, and managing calendars leaves agents with no hours left to build a scalable business. Delegation is the obvious solution, but most attempts fail because virtual assistants (VAs) lack the training to handle complex tasks.
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 his team. The standard approach—pointing agents toward staffing agencies—results in VAs who can do simple, repetitive work but leave complex tasks on the agent’s plate. “The level of training that a lot of these agencies get is very basic, very minimal,” Nimergood says. “They are task-oriented. High repetition, task-oriented things. And that is really offering very minimal lift.”
Nimergood wanted a VA capable of handling complex tasks requiring judgment and deep understanding of a high-performing real estate business. The only way to achieve that was to train the VA himself, from scratch, using his own systems and standards. “I trained him because only I can train him the way that I want to operate my business,” he 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, requiring Nimergood to document workflows, articulate standards, and invest sustained time before seeing a return. The outcome is structural: once the VA could handle 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—listing appointments, showings, negotiations, relationship-building—are the things only he can do. Everything else is delegable, and with proper infrastructure, every hour previously spent on administrative work becomes available for business growth. The broader principle applies beyond VAs: building infrastructure for proper delegation takes longer upfront, but the long-term cost of not doing it is the ceiling. Agents who figure this out earlier are the ones who scale; those who keep doing everything themselves stay busy but don’t build anything.
