Your producers are doing their own document chase. That is the most expensive administrative hour in the building, and it is being worked by the people you hired to win deals.
An assistant the firm provides takes the file work off the floor — document structure, critical dates, listing upkeep — so your brokers stay on the deals instead of the paperwork around them.
VRA places assistants with commercial brokerages, business brokerage firms and commercial divisions inside residential offices.
Free, no obligation — we’ll map what the office would hand off first.
Joel has become a very important part of our company.Isaac Saldaña · Brockway Commercial
A commercial file is heavier than a residential one and it stays open longer. Due diligence periods, estoppels, financials, title objections and a critical-date calendar that carries real consequences if anyone misses it. None of that is optional, so somebody does it — and in most brokerages that somebody is the broker who sourced the deal.
The result is predictable. Every producer invents their own file structure, so nothing is findable by anyone else. Follow-up on listings in flight slips first, because it has no deadline attached. And when a broker leaves, the way their deals ran leaves with them.
Hiring a full-time administrator for the office solves it and costs a salary, benefits and a desk. Most commercial firms decide the problem is not quite big enough for that, and the work goes back on the floor.
The same work an individual broker would hand to an assistant, run once for the firm instead of separately by everyone. The office sets the list of what the assistant handles and it is the same for every broker — that is what lets one assistant cover a floor rather than becoming one person’s help.
The three cards above are an example, not a menu. A firm might staff for transaction coordination alone, or marketing and listing production, or the whole back office — the scope is yours to set. An assistant administers it; they do not supervise anyone and they are not a manager, so decisions stay with you and with your brokers.
The first argument is simpler than recruiting: it widens what the office itself can offer. Most firms provide their agents a brand, systems and a compliance backbone, and then the agent is on their own for everything that is not those things. An assistant extends the list of what the office actually does for the people under its roof.
The second is recruiting. Commercial brokerages compete for producers, and a producer choosing between two firms is weighing what each one does for them. Splits are the obvious lever and the one everybody else is pulling. Administrative support behind the deal is a different answer, and it is one a broker feels in their first month rather than at their first closing.
Commercial firms are put together in very different ways, so the arithmetic is yours rather than ours. One worked example: at KW Commercial Texas a single assistant supports 33 commercial agents, which at the full-time rate is roughly $45 per agent per month. That is one firm’s arrangement and not a formula, but it shows the order of magnitude.
How it gets funded is the firm’s call, and firms land in different places. Some absorb it. Some cover it from fees the producers already pay, which gives those fees something concrete behind them. A firm that already carries support staff can take it from that budget instead, at a fraction of what another hire costs. And some leave it to the individual broker.
Whichever route a firm takes, the number is a flat monthly rate with no payroll taxes, benefits, equipment or severance attached to it. Some firms run one shared assistant; others add a second as the volume justifies it.
A commercial brokerage owner and an agent inside a firm that provides the support, on what it changed.
Joel has become a very important part of our company. He is very attentive, smart, takes a lot of initiative and doesn’t need a whole lot of direction. I teach him something one time and he rolls with it.
Isaac Saldaña, Brockway Commercial · Watch the 60-day check-in
Isaac is the owner. The first assistant was not the right match, so VRA matched him again at no extra cost — the check-in above is about the second one.
Josh is one of the most capable CRE assistants I’ve worked with. He executes with precision, manages deadlines flawlessly, and communicates clearly — no babysitting required.
Sepideh Akhavi, Keller Williams Commercial · Verified Trustpilot review, September 2026
Sepideh is one of the 33 commercial agents the division’s assistant supports.
The rate does not change by industry or by how specialized the work is — one flat rate for reserved hours, not a per-task menu. If you are comparing providers, how to compare any two quotes sets out four questions that expose whether a number is the real one.
It depends on how much of the work is firm-level and how much is deal-level. Where most of it is shared — listing upkeep, file structure, the critical-date calendar — one assistant goes a long way, because the office sets one list of tasks handled the same way for everybody. At KW Commercial Texas a single assistant supports 33 commercial agents on that basis. A firm where every producer wants hands on their own deals will reach the limit sooner. Tell us how your firm is set up and we will say what we think it needs.
Whoever you decide. Most firms route the work through one person — an office manager, a transaction coordinator, or the principal — so the assistant is not taking direction from several brokers at once. An assistant administers the back office; they do not supervise anyone and they are not a manager.
You can swap at any point at no extra cost, with no trial window and no fine print. Brockway Commercial’s first match was wrong and the second has been with them since; the owner’s 60-day check-in above is about the second placement.
Yes. The work is built around how a commercial deal actually moves: organizing deal documents and keeping the structure consistent across files, tracking critical dates across several live deals at once, chasing the parties who owe paperwork, and keeping listings current in LoopNet. Assistants work in CoStar and LoopNet, and in KW Command, RealNex and DocuSign or Authentisign where a firm uses them.
Every assistant completes a mandatory 4-week, instructor-led training program before touching client work, and most applicants never reach a client at all — in our most recent intake, 1,800 applications produced 16 graduating assistants, or 0.89%. Exceptional English communication is a requirement to be hired.
Yes, and most firms do. An office might place an assistant purely on transaction coordination, or on marketing and listing production, or on the administrative work behind the whole floor. What matters more than the breadth is that the list is defined and the same for every broker, so nobody is negotiating for the assistant’s time deal by deal.
That is the firm’s decision, and commercial firms are structured too differently for one answer. Some absorb the cost. Some fund it from fees the producers already pay. A firm with existing support staff can take it from that budget. And some leave it to the brokers — an individual producer can engage their own assistant directly, which is the individual broker version of the same placement.
We commit to 90% proficiency in your systems within 5 business days of starting with you, and once you select your assistant they can start within 24 hours. The first month is usually organization — file structure, naming, where things live — because an assistant working inside a disorganized system spends their time asking where things are. The follow-up work comes second and is where most firms notice the difference.
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