How One Denver Agent Sells 50 Homes a Year With Four Virtual Assistants
- Jerad Larkin
- 11 minutes ago
- 9 min read
How do real estate agents actually use virtual assistants? You document a process you already run, hand it off with a written instruction manual, and buy back the hours you were spending on work nobody needed you to do. Cody Walker runs about 50 deals a year as a solo agent this way.
Cody Walker owns Source Home Group at eXp Realty. About 50 deals in the last twelve months, most of them listings, no team of agents under him. What he does have is four full-time virtual assistants and a transaction coordinator running the back end.
He got on stage at our Unfiltered event in Denver and opened with something I did not expect. A month before he started in real estate he was a college mascot, running around in a suit, sweating. He has ADHD, three traumatic brain injuries, and permanent memory loss that makes recall genuinely difficult. His point was not that he is naturally organized. It was the opposite. He built systems because the life he wanted required it, not because his brain works that way.
Here is the full talk, and the written version underneath.
What this video covers
The hourly rate math that tells you which tasks you should never touch again
When to hire your first assistant, and the transaction counts where Cody added each one
How to turn something you already do into a checklist somebody else can run
The daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly review cadence that keeps it moving
What happened when Google shut down his best lead source overnight
Busy is not the same as done
Cody opened by asking the room how many times someone asks how business is going and the honest answer is just "busy."
Busy all the time. Crazy busy. And at the end of the day you have done a hundred things and finished none of them.
He put two options on the screen and asked which one you are: reactive and exhausted, or present and effective. Most people in that room recognized the first one.
The gap he was pointing at is the one nobody talks about at conferences. Agents get into this business to buy their own freedom, then work twelve hour days seven days a week. He did it too. His first two years were fourteen to sixteen hour days with no days off. Now he is done at five or six most days, rarely works weekends, and takes a month off every year.
He has also sat down one on one with close to 200 agents to talk about exactly this, people earning anywhere from $300,000 to $2 million a year. His summary of what they tell him: they do not have systems, they fly by the seat of their pants, and they hope it works.
The math that reframes your whole week
This was the moment the room went quiet. He asked everyone to pull out their phones.
Take your net income from last year. Divide it by 2,080, which is the Department of Labor's definition of full-time work, 40 hours a week for 52 weeks.
That is your hourly rate.
At $250,000 a year, you are worth roughly $120 an hour. So the question becomes obvious and slightly uncomfortable:
Why are you driving out to hang a lockbox?
Why are you typing showing instructions?
Why are you sending the same email every single week?
His line was the one that landed hardest. If you do not have an assistant, you are the assistant. You are charging $120 an hour to do a $5 an hour task.
He was careful about this, and I want to repeat the caveat because it matters. The work is not beneath you. It is just preventing you from being face to face with clients, generating leads, and following up, and those things are worth far more than $120 an hour.
Discipline, systems, leverage, capacity
The backbone of everything he teaches is four words in order.
Discipline. It works like the gym. You cannot go once a month and expect results. He built his business cold calling, which he is good at and openly hates. Some days it produced two appointments, some two week stretches produced nothing, and he did it every day anyway.
Systems. If you build them, the work becomes repeatable. And systems sound intimidating but most of the time a system is a checklist.
Leverage. A repeatable checklist is something you can hand to somebody else. That is the entire mechanism.
Capacity. Once it is handed off, you get hours back. Capacity is what creates freedom.
The end state he described is worth holding onto: instead of being a cog inside your own business, you become the CEO of it.
Protect the first two hours
His coach told him to protect the first two hours of every day, and early on that meant lead generation.
From 9 to 11 he does not leave his desk. No showings. No closings. And specifically no transaction tasks that are technically due next week but that a client really, really wants done today.
The reason is simple. Your afternoon is going to fall apart. It always does. So the work that actually moves the business has to happen before it can.
What goes in that block as the business matures:
Reviewing the numbers, what is coming in and what is going out
Leads and appointments set, which tells him where to point his time next
Quarterly projects, the CEO work that never has a deadline attached
Pick one process and document it
This is the part you can act on today.
Identify something you are already doing that makes money but not enough, because you are not doing it consistently. Not something you hate. Cody built his business cold calling and still dropped it, because you will not stay consistent at something you dread.
Document it. He records his screen with Loom, clicks generate SOP when he is done, and gets an instruction manual with screenshots of every major step. Then he shares it with an assistant or drops it into a checklist. Often both.
Put the checklist somewhere shared. He uses Asana, which he describes as a checklist on a computer instead of a piece of paper. Trello or Monday work the same way. The advantage is that once it lives there, it is not his job anymore, it is his assistant’s job. And when he sees something new he wants to add, he adds it once and it happens forever.
His listing checklist is over 200 points. He clicks duplicate, adds the address, and it runs. Building it meant walking through the whole arc and writing down what happens at each stage:
What happens before the appointment
What happens once the contract is signed
What happens when photos come back
What happens on launch day and in the first week
What happens if it does not sell
What happens when it goes pending
What happens after closing, including how the review and referral get asked for
None of that is complicated. It is just written down, which is the part almost nobody does.
When to hire, and what it costs
Cody hired his first assistant at 12 transactions, which he called early but maybe not early enough. Another at 24. Two more at 50.
To figure out what to hand off, he keeps a piece of lined paper next to his computer and writes down what he actually did in 30 minute blocks. At the end of the week he goes through it with a highlighter:
Green is money. Keep doing it.
Red is dead. Get it off your plate now.
Yellow is anything you just do not like, and that should probably go too.
Then he takes that list to ChatGPT and asks it to write a role description he can send to a recruiter, based on the tasks he highlighted.
On cost, he was specific and a little self-aware about it. Four full-time assistants runs him around $50,000 a year, a number that used to scare him. Depending on your price point, that is two or three transactions. What he gets back is roughly 160 hours a week of capacity, and more marketing and client touches than he could ever produce alone. His clients do not talk to his assistants directly, but they get the emails, the texts, and the automated searches.
What his assistants actually produced
This is where it stops being theory.
One assistant spent about ten minutes a day on his Google Business Profile. That work brought in 14 transactions last year.
Another brought in 31, which is more than most agents sell in a year, working from the Philippines at roughly $4 an hour. He bonuses her and says plainly that he never wants her to leave. Worth noting since people ask: his four assistants are not all paid the same rate, it varies by person and role.
When Google shut the whole thing down
Here is the part I would not have expected to be the most useful section of the talk.
His Google Business Profile was producing. Almost $300,000 in the first nine months of last year, at no ad cost. Then he updated his address and the page was gone overnight.
That is a business-ending event for a lot of people. What he did instead was take the assistant who had been running Google and tell her she needed to become an expert in database marketing, and she needed to be one by tomorrow. He gave her the classes to take and the people to follow.
Within six months they had more signed contracts from the database than they had gotten from Google and the database combined the year before. Up 68% year over year.
The lesson is not really about Google. It is that when your capacity lives in trained people running documented systems, you can redirect it. When it all lives in your own head and your own calendar, you cannot.
I will add the title version of the same point, because I watch this happen from the closing side. Agents build their whole pipeline on one platform they do not own. Referral relationships, your database, and your reputation are the parts nobody can switch off.
Your 7 day challenge
Cody closed with homework, and it is small enough to actually do.
Pick one process in your business you are already doing but not well enough to be satisfied. Facebook ads, video, open houses, whatever it is.
Record what you already do, and write down the things you wish you were doing.
Build it into a checklist: the steps, the frequency, and what success looks like.
Put it in a tool like Asana, or have ChatGPT build the checklist for you.
Define the result. What does a successful open house, ad, or video campaign actually look like in numbers?
Schedule the review. End of the month, on a Friday, in your calendar.
That last one is the step people skip, and it is the one that makes the rest compound.
About Cody Walker
Cody Walker owns Source Home Group at eXp Realty and closed about 50 deals in the last 12 months, most of them listings, as a solo agent. He runs the back end with four full-time virtual assistants and a transaction coordinator. Before real estate he was a college mascot and worked in sports marketing and branding at Red Bull, which is where he learned to measure everything.
He also offered to connect agents with the VA recruiter his team uses, and to help with onboarding and training. Message him the word VA on Instagram:
FAQ
How much does a real estate virtual assistant cost?
Full-time virtual assistants in this model generally run in the range of $5 to $8 an hour, and rates vary by person and by role. Cody’s four full-time assistants cost him roughly $50,000 a year in total, which he frames as two or three transactions depending on your price point.
When should a real estate agent hire their first assistant?
Cody hired his first at 12 transactions and says that was early but arguably not early enough. A more useful test than transaction count is the hourly one: divide last year’s net income by 2,080, then look at how many hours a week you spend on tasks worth a fraction of that number.
What should I hand off to a virtual assistant first?
Track what you actually do in 30 minute blocks for a week, then mark each item green for money-producing, red for dead weight, and yellow for anything you dislike. Red and yellow go first. Green stays with you.
What tools do you need to build real estate systems?
Cody uses Loom to record a task and auto-generate a written SOP with screenshots, and Asana to hold the shared checklists. Trello and Monday do the same job as Asana. ChatGPT can draft the checklist itself if you describe the process.
Can you sell 50 homes a year as a solo agent?
Cody does it without a team of agents under him, using four virtual assistants and a transaction coordinator for the back end. The constraint is not usually talent, it is how many low-value hours you are still absorbing personally.
Want more like this
I run classes, workshops, and panels like this one across Denver Metro all year, and the goal is always the same. You walk out with something you can use that week.
Subscribe to my weekly emails for real estate marketing ideas, AI tools, and invites to upcoming classes and events across Colorado:
And when your systems start producing more closings, my team at Chicago Title of Colorado is who I would put on the file. Leverage gets you more contracts. A clean closing is what makes those clients send you the next one.
Jerad Larkin
The Mile High Title Guy
Chicago Title of Colorado
303.630.9430 | Info@MileHighTitleGuy.com
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