Real Estate VA: Property Onboarding, Purchasing & Reconciliation

REAL ESTATE VIRTUAL ASSISTANT: PROPERTY ONBOARDING, PURCHASING AND RECONCILIATION

Please read this whole post before applying. There are instructions at the bottom, and how you follow them is the first thing we look at.

ABOUT US

We run full-service, hands-off management for short-term rental owners across the US. An owner hands us an empty house. We furnish it, wire it, stock it, style it, photograph it, license it, connect it to the booking channels and open it to guests. Then our management team runs it.

That middle part is a project with about two hundred moving pieces and a hard finish line, and right now it lives almost entirely in our founder's head. That is the whole reason this seat exists. Most days are a spreadsheet, a vendor invoice, a receipt, a permit portal and a follow-up list.

We automate everything software can do. What software cannot do is notice that a vendor invoice and a card statement disagree by $16.48 and go find out why, or notice on day one that the internet install is booked eleven days out and the permit needs a floor plan that nobody has drawn yet.

We are growing. Our written plan is 150 managed doors by the end of 2027. This is the first seat of its kind here and it will not be the last one.

WHAT THIS ROLE REALLY IS

Two lanes, one person. Every case below is real. Money amounts are changed, for a reason we explain further down. The shapes are all real.

LANE ONE, THE RECORD OF THE MONEY.

Nineteen furniture lines on a live property are flagged as ordered. There is no order number behind any of them, no charge on any card, and no confirmation from the vendor. Either they were bought and nobody wrote it down, or somebody typed a word into the wrong cell. The difference is $4,318.62. If you place that order and it was already placed, the owner pays for the same furniture twice, and nobody finds out for a month.

• Two lines carry the same item name and two different product links, so the house is getting either four sofas or two, a $2,144.75 question, and the owner is reading it as one line.
• A vendor invoice hit the card as $9,340.55 on the 12th and another $812.07 on the 19th, because that vendor captures payment as items ship. The record held only the first number, so the property looked $812.07 cheaper than it was.
• A tax column on an Oregon delivery showed $22.50 per mattress and nothing on the other sixty items. That is not tax. It is a state recycling fee that is legitimately owed, and two people here have already gotten it wrong.
• A four-figure order shipped to one property's address and belonged to a different property's plan. The ship-to address is never the answer. The item list is.
• One plan column read $10,462.31 against an order total of $10,462.08. A twenty-three cent gap between two numbers computed from completely different inputs made the row look reconciled while the real figure underneath it sat $1,384.90 low.

LANE TWO, GETTING THE HOUSE TO THE FINISH LINE.

A house is furnished, wired, cleaned and photographed, and it still cannot take a guest, because the city permit needs a floor plan, the floor plan needs a measured scan nobody has ordered, and the internet install is booked eleven days out. Somebody has to know that on day one, not in week five.

• Four separate deliveries land at a vacant house in one week. Three arrive, one is refused at the curb for freight damage, and the replacement ships to the wrong state. A box left at the door of an empty house is nobody's until somebody is named, and you are the person who names them.
• A utility account is open, but it is in the previous owner's name, autopay is off, and we are not listed as an authorized contact, which means the day the power goes out nobody at that utility will speak to us.
• A city changes its short-term rental rules mid-project. The registration the property was counting on no longer exists and the path is now a discretionary hearing. Finding that out in week two is a plan change. Finding it out in week nine is a dead launch.
• The listing goes up with the nightly rate still on the platform's starter default, the maximum stay set to 365 nights, and the house rules field empty. Every one of those is a field somebody had to set, and nobody did.
• Eight vendors are needed before the first guest: cleaner, plumber, electrician, HVAC, handyman, landscaper, pool, pest. Sourcing them is the easy half. The hard half is that every one of those phone numbers has to be dialed once before we call it a directory.

The honest description of this role: it is detective work on money, and chasing on everything else. It is quiet and it is deliberate.

The person who is great at it is the person who genuinely cannot leave a number alone when it does not tie, who would rather spend forty minutes finding the missing $16.48 than type over the cell and move on, and who also will not let a utility company, a permit office or a busy designer go three days without an answer.

This is not task-list work. Nobody is going to send you a list each morning telling you which rows to price or which office to call. You run a weekly rhythm and a countdown you can read yourself, so you already know.

If that reads as tedious to you, we would genuinely rather you skip this one. If it reads as a puzzle with a deadline, keep going.

WHAT YOU WILL OWN

THE BUDGET RECORD. One Google Sheet per property, our launch budget tracker. It is the single record of what the property is buying, what it committed to, what actually got charged and what is left. Every property in flight has one and you run all of them.

• Price every row on the plan that has no price. Find the item, confirm the variant, the size and the pack quantity, and put a real number on it.
• Load the purchasing carts against the plan. This has real traps. Our cart holds a hard 50 lines, and line 51 silently pushes the oldest line out into Saved for later, so a 152 row accessories list is four separate orders and you d ---------- the batches up front. Re-adding an item that is already in the cart raises its quantity instead of warning you. You verify by item code and quantity, never by the badge in the corner.
• Tag every order back onto the plan rows it paid for, so nothing is bought that the sheet does not know about.
• Log every card charge as its own row, with the invoice's true order total rather than the first posting that showed up, and file the receipt the day it exists. A charge with no receipt cannot be cleanly billed back, which means a missing receipt is money the company cannot recover that month.
• Reconcile every vendor invoice against what we actually committed to, line by line, and produce the defect list. What was charged, what was ordered, what is missing, what does not agree, and which of those is a real problem versus a coi ---------- .
• Run the flag pass every Friday. Filter the exception column and clear everything that is not clean. Some of our checks run from scripts on our side and we run them against your sheet, so your pass has to be clean before it reaches them.
• Chase our designer for the receipts, the property attributions and the open answers that nobody else is going to chase. The buying happens in person, in other states, on a company card, and store receipts print department codes instead of product names, so only the person who was standing there can say which room a $340 receipt belongs to.
• Open a tracker for a new property from our template and type the house into the quantity calculator: bedrooms, beds by size, baths, sleeps, TVs, floors. Half the quantities calculate themselves off those numbers, so this is not data entry, it is the foundation. Every count comes from a written source, and when two written sources disagree you flag it instead of picking a winner.
• Watch the envelope. The plan has a cap, and the week you first see that the plan is going to cross it, you say so out loud. Weeks early, not at the end.
• Produce the close-out: the reconciliation that says whether the owner is owed a refund or owes a true-up, and the drafted invoice or refund figure behind it.

THE COUNTDOWN. From the day the management agreement is executed to the day our management team can run the house without you.

• The calendar itself. Every property on one board, every gate current, every date real. You own the answer to "where is this house and what is it waiting on," and you own it before anybody has to ask.
• Accounts and utilities. Every account to Active in the correct name, us named as an authorized contact with call-in and outage rights, autopay and paperless set, and the internet ordered with the install date captured the day it books. That date is the longest lead time in most launches.
• Licensing, permits and tax. Research the market's short-term rental rules and confirm the property qualifies before anyone spends money assuming it does. Assemble the permit application, including the floor plan. Open the portal account, submit, and track it to ISSUED. Send the neighbor notices where they are required. Get the permit number into every advertisement. Register the lodging and occupancy tax accounts and record which channel remits what.
• Insurance and the vendor bench. Chase the certificate of insurance and file it. Source and qualify the local vendor bench, capture after-hours rates, and get recurring landscaping, pool and pest started so the first visit lands before the first guest.
• The physical fate of every order. The delivery calendar, tracking numbers, backorders, what arrived, what did not, what arrived damaged, what got reshipped and when, what got returned.
• Listing provisioning. Import the property into our management system and map every field. Confirm the two-way calendar and rate sync. Connect our pricing tool. Connect our cleaning tool, assign the cleaner and apply the right checklist. Expand to the additional channels. Stage all of it and hand it to us to publish.
• The property record. The project folder, th