By Keith Dunham, Founder & CEO of Empower Transactions. Keith built Empower after running operations at HomeCity Real Estate, where he helped scale the brokerage to hundreds of closings a month before its sale to Better Homes & Gardens Real Estate. He also co-founded Opcity, later acquired by Realtor.com.
The virtual assistant is sold as the cheap option. Hourly, offshore, no benefits, no desk. For a solo agent it is the expensive one, and the reason is arithmetic rather than quality: a VA is bought by the hour and a transaction coordinator is bought by the file, and the file count is what a solo agent does not have.
MyOutDesk, which publishes its rates, lists a starting rate of $1,988 a month for a full-time managed virtual assistant. That is $23,856 a year. At our published $400 per contract-to-close file, per-file coordination costs less than the VA until the agent closes about 60 sides a year. The typical individual agent in the National Association of Realtors’ 2026 Member Profile closed nine. The median team — a different survey cut, averaging four members — closed 32 in total. Neither is close.
Why it matters — the agent choosing between a coordinator, a VA and an unlicensed assistant is often choosing their first non-producing hire, and the first hire sets the cost structure for everything after it. Choosing by hourly rate when your volume is measured in files leaves a nine-side agent paying more for support than the median member spends on their entire business.
What is the difference between a transaction coordinator, a virtual assistant and an unlicensed assistant?
Three things: what you pay for, where they sit, and what they are allowed to touch.
A transaction coordinator is paid by the file. The scope is contract to close: deadlines, disclosures, signatures, document routing to lender and title, the closing checklist. Priced in the market that sells to agents directly, that is a few hundred dollars a file — we publish $400 in most states and $500 in California, with a $500 monthly minimum; Transactly’s plans work out to $339 to $399 a transaction at one file a month.
A virtual assistant is paid by the month for a block of hours — in the managed model MyOutDesk publishes, eight hours a day, five days a week, offshore — and the scope is whatever you assign: inbox, CRM, listing input, social posts, follow-up calls, and coordination if you train them to do it. MyOutDesk’s $1,988 starting rate, and $2,500 for specialized roles, is the published benchmark for the managed version of this model. Dedicated means dedicated to you: the agent sets the process, trains the person and manages the output, and that is the trade the monthly rate buys. In the per-file model the firm owns the process and the output, and the agent pays for a closed file rather than for hours they have to direct.
An unlicensed assistant is a W-2 or 1099 hire sitting in your market, paid by the hour, doing the same administrative work with the added ability to physically be places — drop off keys, meet an inspector, sit at the front desk. The Bureau of Labor Statistics put the median wage for office and administrative support occupations at $47,450 in its May 2025 data, about $23 an hour; a half-time hire at that wage is roughly $24,000 a year before payroll taxes and any benefits, and a fully loaded full-time seat runs about $69,100 at the BLS employer-cost ratio.
Which brings us to the third difference. What the unlicensed person may touch is set by your state real estate commission, and the published lists are narrower than the job descriptions.
What can an unlicensed assistant legally do?
It depends on the state, and the state publishes the list. Texas is the clearest example because the Texas Real Estate Commission has written it out. An unlicensed assistant in Texas may do clerical and secretarial work, set appointments to show a listing, place signs and advertisements as directed by the broker, confirm the size, price and terms of an advertised property to callers when identified to them as unlicensed, keep the books, and help a buyer gather information and forms to apply for a loan. They may not show property — which TREC defines to include opening doors and hosting open houses — solicit or telemarket, direct or supervise license holders, sign on a trust account, or, in the commission’s words, “review contracts, or help make ‘deals’ work.” TREC adds that the broker or sales agent who employs the unlicensed person “might be criminally charged” as well.
Dig in — notice what the Texas list does not name: coordination. Tracking deadlines, collecting signatures and routing documents are not on either side of it. The question for each of those acts is whether it is “clerical or secretarial” work, and that is a judgment the broker makes, with counsel where it is close. What a coordinator can do is make the judgment easy by never negotiating, advising or deciding — the line TREC draws at “help make deals work.” A VA who drifts across it — calling the other side about a repair credit, say — may be on the wrong side of that line without the agent knowing it.
Other states publish their own lists, and they differ at the edges. If you are not in Texas, find your commission’s version before you write the job description. We are not affiliated with TREC or any commission, and this is a description of a published list, not legal advice.
Which is cheaper per closed file?
Run all three against the same year of business.
- Nine sides (the NAR median individual agent). Per-file coordination: $3,600 in fees, or $6,000 once our monthly minimum, billed every month, is counted. Managed VA: $23,856. Half-time local assistant: about $23,000 in wages alone. The VA and the assistant each cost roughly four times the coordinator, for files that do not fill their hours.
- 32 sides (the NAR median team, four members, buying coordination for the whole team). Per-file coordination: $12,800. Managed VA: $23,856. Half-time assistant: $23,000 before burden. The coordinator is still cheaper, though the VA’s spare hours now have somewhere to go.
- About 60 sides. $23,856 divided by $400 is 59.6 files. Above that, a full-time VA who does nothing but coordination costs less per file than paying by the file — provided the VA can carry five files a month without the error rate that made you hire help in the first place.
Two things move the crossover. In California, at our $500 rate, it drops to about 48 sides. And any VA hour spent on work other than coordination — the inbox, the CRM, the listing photos — comes out of the coordination capacity; 2,080 hours cannot be spent twice.
What to watch — the price that decides this is not the rate on the pricing page; it is the minimum. Our $500 monthly floor turns nine files into $667 apiece. A monthly VA contract turns nine files into $2,650 apiece. Both are published, both are real, and the second is the one to read first.
Which one does a solo agent actually need?
At the median, the coordinator or nothing, and often nothing — we have run that arithmetic separately, and it says the nine-side agent’s coordinator should be paid for by the brokerage. The agent who needs a VA is the one with a lead-generation problem that hours can fix: a database that is not being called, listings that are not being marketed. That is a real problem and a VA is a fair answer to it. It is not a paperwork problem, and buying 2,000 hours a year to solve a nine-file problem is how the cheap option becomes the expensive one.
The agent who needs a local unlicensed assistant is the one whose constraint is physical presence — a listing-heavy business with keys, signs, inspectors and stagers to meet. Nothing remote solves that. Everything in the file can be done remotely, which is why coordination is the piece of the job that outsources cleanly and presence is the piece that does not.
For a team lead at 30 or 40 sides, the order of operations is the same one brokerages use at larger scale: buy the file work by the file first, because it scales down to zero in a slow month; add the hourly seat when there is enough non-file work to fill it; and hold the licensing line for whoever ends up touching the contract.
The bottom line — a virtual assistant is cheaper by the hour and more expensive by the file until roughly 60 sides a year, a threshold the median solo agent is nowhere near and the median four-member team does not reach either. A half-time local assistant costs about what a full-time managed VA does in wages alone, a full-time one roughly double, and the local hire is the only option that can be somewhere in person, which is the one thing a file never needs. Price the hire by the unit you actually produce. For most agents that unit is the file.
Method note: vendor rates are as each firm publishes them on its own site as of September 2026 and change without notice; check the current page before relying on one. Volume figures are from NAR’s 2026 Member Profile (2025 business year): a median of nine sides for individual agents and a median of 32 sides reported by team-based brokerage specialists, which we read as team-level production as HousingWire does; the two are different survey populations, so the comparison is directional. Wage figures are BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook, May 2025 data, with the fully loaded seat derived from BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, March 2026; a half-time hire carries a different benefit profile and the wage-only figure understates its cost. The Texas list is TREC’s published guidance on unlicensed assistants; other states differ. Empower Transactions is not affiliated with, certified by, or endorsed by TREC, any state real estate commission, or the National Association of REALTORS®, and this article is not legal advice.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between a transaction coordinator and a virtual assistant?
A transaction coordinator is paid by the file and works a fixed scope from contract to close: deadlines, disclosures, signatures and document routing. A virtual assistant is paid by the month for a block of hours, usually full time and offshore, and does whatever the agent assigns. The pricing unit is the real difference: at low file volume the per-file coordinator costs a fraction of a monthly VA contract. The management unit is the other: the VA is a person the agent trains and manages, while a per-file coordination firm manages the process itself.
Is a virtual assistant cheaper than a transaction coordinator?
By the hour, yes; by the closed file, usually not. A full-time managed virtual assistant is priced by the month for roughly 2,000 hours a year, and at the per-file rates published in this market the coordinator costs less than that contract until roughly 60 closed sides a year. The median individual agent in NAR’s 2026 Member Profile closed nine sides, and the median team, averaging four members, closed 32 in total.
What can an unlicensed real estate assistant legally do?
Each state real estate commission publishes its own list. In Texas, TREC permits an unlicensed assistant to do clerical work, set showing appointments, place signs and ads as directed by the broker, confirm advertised size, price and terms, keep books, and help a buyer gather loan forms. They may not show property or host open houses, solicit, supervise license holders, sign on trust accounts, or review contracts and help make deals work. TREC states the employing broker or sales agent might be criminally charged for a violation. Other states differ, and this is not legal advice.
Can a virtual assistant do transaction coordination?
The work can be done remotely, and in Texas TREC treats clerical work as work an unlicensed person may do; whether each coordination task is clerical is the broker’s call, and the assistant has to stay out of negotiation and advice. The cost problem is that a full-time VA contract is priced for about 2,080 hours a year, and a solo agent’s files do not fill them; whatever the spare hours go to competes with coordination for the same capacity. This is not legal advice.
Do I need a transaction coordinator, a virtual assistant or an in-house assistant?
Match the hire to the constraint. A paperwork constraint is a per-file problem and a coordinator fits it once the volume clears the monthly minimum. A lead-generation constraint is an hours problem and a virtual assistant fits it. A physical-presence constraint, such as keys, signs and inspectors on a listing-heavy business, needs a local hire. Buy the file work by the file first, because it scales down in a slow month, and add hourly seats when there is non-file work to fill them.
How much does an in-house real estate assistant cost?
The Bureau of Labor Statistics put the median wage for office and administrative support occupations at $47,450 a year in its May 2025 data, about $23 an hour. A half-time hire is roughly $24,000 in wages before payroll taxes and benefits, and a fully loaded full-time seat runs about $69,100 using the BLS employer-cost ratio.
For solo agents and teams
Find your own crossover.
Send your side count and the work you would actually hand off. We will run per-file against per-hour at your volume and tell you which is cheaper for you, and where a licensed pair of hands still has to touch the file.
