Commercial real estate virtual assistant: what one costs against an AI agent, on published rates

Short answer: a commercial real estate virtual assistant costs $8 to $15 an hour offshore, about $1,300 to $2,600 a month full time, on the published guide of one US agency that places them, and $1,500 to $3,000 a month from the managed US services that publish a rate. That buys 45 to about 160 capped hours, and on a CRE desk the owner prospecting row is the first one squeezed when a third listing goes live. An AI agent at $149 a month flat does the list building, the outreach drafting, the confidentiality agreement chasing and the CRM work with no hour cap. It cannot pick up the phone, tour a building or underwrite.

We sell the flat rate AI agent, so we have an interest in how this comes out. Every vendor figure below was read from the vendor's own site on the date given. Go and check them.

The desk we are pricing

Commercial brokerage has a particular shape for an admin problem. The fee arrives when a sale closes or a lease is executed, months after the first letter to the owner or the first canvassing call to the tenant, so the desk always has two queues: the one that pays this quarter (inquiries, tours, the OM, the LOI, diligence) and the one that pays next year (the owner list). Both matter and they never both get worked, because the first is urgent and the second is not. Whoever you hire to help is really being hired to keep the second queue moving while you are in the first.

Here is the weekly task list we priced, which is the one most small CRE firms describe when asked what they would hand to an assistant tomorrow.

The last row is the whole point. Everything above it is gathering, drafting, chasing and recording. The broker keeps the pricing, the tour, the negotiation and the relationship, which is where the commission is earned. Nothing on this page changes that.

What a commercial real estate virtual assistant costs, on published rates

Two kinds of vendor publish a price for this. The first is the offshore placement agency. ExpertVA, a US agency that markets a commercial real estate assistant by name, published a guide on July 28, 2026 that puts an offshore CRE assistant at $8 to $15 an hour, about $1,300 to $2,600 a month for 160 hours, $700 to $1,300 a month for a 20-hour week, against $25 to $35 an hour for a US-based assistant. Those are one agency's figures for its own placements, not a market survey, and we quote them as such.

The second is the managed US virtual assistant service. Three of them publish a price of their own. We read all three from their own sites on September 2, 2026 and worked them through on our virtual assistant cost page.

Two things to notice. The cheapest per hour among the US services, Athena, is the most expensive per month, because it is the only one selling a whole month of someone's time; Belay's single published rate is the subject of its own page, Belay pricing, because Belay publishes three different ranges on three of its own hosts. And the offshore figure is a band, not a price: an assistant at $8 who has never opened a data platform export and one at $15 who has abstracted leases are different purchases with the same label.

The data seat is a separate line, and it is the one with the clearest price

An assistant on a CRE desk needs a login to the property data, and that login is priced per seat. Of the four platforms a broker is most likely to prospect from, one publishes what it costs. PropertyRadar, which markets to commercial agents by name, publishes $119 a month for its Solo plan ($99 on annual billing), $249 for Team and $599 for Business, and $50 a month for each additional user on Solo, read from its pricing page on September 18, 2026. Reonomy's pricing page, read the same day, offers a monthly and an annual plan and shows no dollar figure for either; the Buy now button opens a sign-up. CoStar publishes no list price, and Crexi's pricing page sits behind a bot verification wall we could not read. So the assistant's seat is at least $50 a month on the one published rate card, on top of the assistant, and on the unpublished platforms it is whatever your account manager says a second login costs. We set the data platforms side by side on the AI for commercial real estate brokers page.

Where 55 hours goes on a CRE desk

The number that decides this comparison is not the monthly fee. It is how many of the purchased hours reach the owner list after the inquiry queue has eaten its share. The allocation below is an assumption, not a measurement, and it is a conservative one for a firm with two investment sale listings in market drawing a normal volume of OM requests.

Fifteen hours a month of prospecting is under four hours a week, and it is the row that gets cut first when a third listing launches, because the OM requests are urgent and the owner list is not. That is the structural problem with buying hours for this desk: the two queues compete for the same capped budget and the one that pays next year always loses. It is not the assistant's fault. It is the unit.

What it costs as the listings grow

A flat rate and an hourly plan diverge the moment the work grows, so here is the arithmetic at one, two, three and five listings in market. We assume each additional listing adds roughly ten hours a month of inquiry intake, follow-up and document chasing, and that you refuse to let prospecting fall below 15 hours. Both assumptions are stated so you can change them.

The third listing is the cliff on the managed unit. On a 55 hour block it forces either a second unit, which doubles the bill, or the quiet decision to stop prospecting, which costs nothing this month and a closing next year. The offshore hourly line looks gentle by comparison, and it is, provided the hours are billed as worked and the person is good; the band is wide precisely because that is not guaranteed, and it excludes the data seat and the time you spend training someone on your submarket from scratch. Athena's $3,000 for a full-time assistant avoids the cliff at the price of paying for a full month from listing one.

What the agent does on this desk, and what it does not

An AI agent is a different unit from all of these. You brief it once, in plain English, on the criteria for an owner prospect in your asset class and submarket, the confidentiality agreement and buyer profile you use, the chase schedule, the tone for owners and the tone for buyers' reps, and what the Monday report should contain. It then works both queues every day: filters and enriches the list from your data export, drafts the outreach for your approval, sends the CA to every inquiry the same hour, chases the unsigned ones, follows up after the OM, logs everything in the CRM and assembles the report. There is no hour cap, so listing three does not take anything away from prospecting. It is $149 a month flat and the plan detail is on the pricing page.

The honest limits: an assistant can pick up the phone and an agent cannot. CRE prospecting still runs on the call after the letter, and if the volume of dials is your real bottleneck, an AI cold calling service is a different unit again and worth pricing separately, with your compliance counsel's view on the TCPA in hand first. An agent also cannot tour a building, read a room at a tenant meeting, or underwrite; those are the broker's and the analyst's. Many firms run both: the agent works the volume and keeps the records, and the broker or a part-time assistant takes the calls and the tours it surfaces, so the purchased hours go a great deal further.

How to decide

Price the desk, not the vendor. Count the listings you expect in market over the next two quarters, estimate the inquiry and document hours each one generates, add the prospecting hours you refuse to cut, and see whether that fits inside a 55 hour unit with room to spare. If it does, and your process leans on phone calls and tours, a managed assistant at $1,500 to $2,070 a month or a well-chosen offshore assistant at the top of the band is a reasonable buy. If it does not, or if prospecting is the thing that keeps getting cut, buy the unit that does not run out of hours and keep the calls for yourself. The same arithmetic for the general case, without the CRE specifics, is on AI vs hiring a virtual assistant.

Questions people ask before buying

How much does a commercial real estate virtual assistant cost?

On published figures: $8 to $15 an hour offshore, about $1,300 to $2,600 a month full time, per one US placement agency's guide dated July 28, 2026, and $1,500 to $3,000 a month from the managed US services that publish a price (Prialto, Belay, Athena, read September 2, 2026). Add a data platform seat, which is $50 a month on the one published rate card. A flat-rate AI agent for the same admin and prospecting work is $149 a month with no hour cap.

Is it cheaper to hire a commercial real estate VA offshore?

Per hour, yes, by a factor of two to four against a US-based assistant on the same agency's figures. Per useful hour, it depends on training: an offshore assistant who has never worked a data platform export or a CA process spends the first weeks learning your submarket on your time, and the wide $8 to $15 band reflects that. Cheaper than a managed US service in every scenario in the table above; not automatically cheaper than a flat rate that needs no training beyond a written brief.

Can a virtual assistant do commercial real estate underwriting?

They can build the model from your template and populate it from the rent roll and the T-12, and an experienced one will do that competently. Deciding the cap rate, the exit assumption and the price you recommend to the owner is judgement the broker or analyst keeps, both because it is where your value is and because advising a client on a transaction is licensed activity in every state. The same line applies to an AI agent: it gathers and organizes the inputs and flags what is missing; it does not underwrite.

What does a commercial real estate virtual assistant do?

Deal sourcing research, transaction and lease administration, CRM and pipeline management, and marketing and investor relations support, in the words of the agency guide we quoted, which also lists CoStar, Crexi, LoopNet, Argus and HubSpot among the tools it expects them to know. In practice on a small desk that means owner list building, outreach drafting, CA and profile chasing, post-OM follow-up, document collection and the Monday report, which is the same list an agent runs.