InspectRealEstate Virtual Assistant: a VA who clears the enquiry queue and the 2Apply pile

Nobody googles “inspectrealestate virtual assistant” after a quiet week. You search it on a Monday, because Saturday you ran six opens, Sunday the 2Apply notifications didn’t stop, and this morning there are forty applications sitting unprocessed while the enquiry queue refills itself. IRE has already done its part: the auto-responder answered every portal enquiry, the registered attendees got their confirmations, the applications arrived complete-ish and structured. What IRE cannot do is the part that eats your leasing consultant alive, which is everything between “application received” and “keys handed over”.

A quick word on the name, since the industry uses three of them interchangeably. InspectRealEstate, IRE to almost everyone who uses it, was built in Brisbane back in 2011, was acquired by Reapit, and as of July 2025 sits inside the unified Reapit platform. The product your office logs into is the same lettings engine; the badge on it now says Reapit. We’ll call it IRE here because that is what property managers type into Google, and into their browser bar.

The daily rhythm a VA runs in your InspectRealEstate

First pass, before 9am: make the auto-responder honest. IRE’s enquiry auto-responder is brilliant right up until the moment a listing has no inspection times loaded, at which point it politely replies to prospects with nothing to offer them. Your VA’s first job each morning is checking every live listing has current availability: new opens loaded, tenanted properties scheduled inside your state’s entry-notice window, and private appointment slots offered on the listings where a Saturday open keeps drawing two people and a dog. Then the human enquiries, the ones the auto-responder can’t answer: is the courtyard pet-friendly, can the lease start on the 14th instead of the 1st, can I apply before I inspect. Each one answered in your templates, on Australian business hours, the same morning it arrived.

Mid-morning: the 2Apply pile. This is the heart of the placement. Every application that comes through 2Apply gets a completeness pass the day it lands: identity documents checked against your criteria sheet, income evidence present and actually legible, the gaps chased by SMS while the applicant is still keen. 2Apply sends reference requests to employers and previous agents automatically, and then, like every automated request ever sent, a third of them go quiet. The VA works that gap all day: re-sending, phoning the payroll officer who doesn’t do email, recording each response on the application. By the time a file reaches your property manager it is verified, referenced and summarised, and the PM’s job has shrunk from processing to deciding.

Afternoon: statuses and the sign-up path. Applicants ring your office for one reason: nobody told them anything. The VA keeps every application’s status current in IRE as files move from received to shortlisted to approved or declined, sends the unsuccessful applicants a prompt, decent no in your wording, and walks the approved applicant through the holding deposit and sign-up sequence the same day the PM says yes. The three-day silence after approval is where good tenants take the other property; the VA’s job is making sure that silence never happens.

Midweek: private inspections and the no-show problem. Not every prospect can make a Saturday 10:15, and the good ones, the double-income applicants relocating for work, often can’t. The VA offers private appointment times through IRE on the listings that warrant it, coordinates access with the outgoing tenant where the property is still occupied, and manages the no-show tax that comes with one-on-one bookings: confirmation the day before, a reminder the morning of, and a rebooking message to anyone who registered and didn’t front. When a tenant withdraws consent for an open at 4pm Friday, the VA pushes the cancellation through IRE so every registered attendee gets the message that night, then reoffers times before the weekend interest goes cold.

After every open: the follow-up nobody has time for. IRE hands you a registered attendee list for each inspection. Most offices do nothing with it. Your VA messages every attendee within 24 hours: are you applying, what put you off, would a different configuration suit. Attendee numbers and feedback get summarised per listing, so when a property has run three opens with thin interest, your PM walks into the price-or-presentation conversation with the lessor carrying evidence instead of impressions. The pricing recommendation itself stays with the PM; the VA builds the case file.

Weekly: keys and the handover check. A KeyWhere audit every week: keys signed out and back in against the register, overdue sets chased with the tradies and building managers holding them, so Saturday’s inspection run never starts with a drawer search. And whenever an approved tenancy pushes across IRE’s integration to PropertyMe, Property Tree or Console, the VA confirms it landed clean on the other side, because a transposed bond amount is a small mistake in July and a tribunal exhibit in March.

The measure of all of it is one number: days vacant. Every day a property sits empty costs your lessor a day’s rent and costs you the conversation about why. The whole rhythm above, times always loaded, applications processed same-day, references chased instead of awaited, approvals converted to sign-ups within hours, exists to compress the gap between listed and leased. When we review an IRE placement at the 30-day mark, that is the number Jenn asks about first.

The honest bit

Five things worth knowing before you brief anyone into IRE.

The auto-responder automates the reply, not the diary. If nobody loads inspection times, IRE will keep answering enquiries with a booking link that leads nowhere, and the queue looks handled while prospects quietly drop off. The tool’s biggest failure mode isn’t a bug; it’s an empty availability screen. That is precisely the gap a VA closes.

Reference checks send automatically and return manually. 2Apply’s automation ends at the referee’s inbox. Employers ignore reference emails, previous agents sit on them, and the difference between a two-day approval and a nine-day approval is almost always a human chasing referees. No setting fixes this.

IRE as most offices run it is a lettings engine, not a property management platform. IRE One does exist, with its own trust system, arrears and maintenance modules, but the common setup keeps the trust ledger, the arrears run and the maintenance queue in a separate rent roll platform. The day a tenancy starts, the work moves to PropertyMe, Property Tree or Console, which is why the strongest version of this placement is one VA who spans both systems rather than a leasing-only seat.

2Apply is only as strict as your criteria sheet. The form collects what applicants choose to give it, in whatever quality they photograph it. A blurry payslip, an ID document that doesn’t quite match the applicant’s name, a rental history with a suspicious twelve-month gap: 2Apply will accept all of them without complaint. The screening standard lives in your office’s checklist, not in the software, which is why the first document we build in onboarding is your application criteria written down as an SOP the VA can verify against line by line.

The Reapit merge is still settling. Since IRE folded into the unified Reapit platform in July 2025, menus, branding and login paths have been shifting, and anyone who promises their muscle memory matches next quarter’s UI is guessing. We train VAs on your leasing process, documented as SOPs during onboarding, so a moved button is a shrug rather than a stoppage.

What stays with you

Property management is licensed-agency work under state tenancy legislation, so the line is bright and we hold it. The VA never approves or declines an applicant: tenant selection carries anti-discrimination law and stays with your property manager, decided on the verified file the VA prepared. Rent setting and any price conversation with a lessor stays with the PM, informed by the attendee feedback the VA gathered. Lease signing, bond lodgement, breach notices and anything tribunal-shaped are yours. Trust money never enters the picture: the VA’s IRE seat carries no trust access, and no trust login is ever issued in your rent roll system either. And if an applicant discloses hardship, or anything that touches protected-attribute territory, the VA escalates it to your PM under a written rule rather than exercising judgement they should not hold.

What it costs and where to start

IRE and 2Apply work sits on the admin tier: $12-17 AUD an hour excl GST, typically 10-15 hours a week, which lands around $500-1,100 a month. Leasing volume is lumpy, so hours flex with your listing count rather than locking you into a peak-season figure year-round. Placement takes 7-10 business days from the discovery call, with the first 5-7 days supervised inside your IRE account, starting on inspection times and the enquiry queue where errors are cheap and visible. A $500 refundable deposit is credited to your first month, the first 30 days carry our recalibrate-or-replace guarantee, and there is no lock-in beyond 14 days notice.

If you want the wider picture of what a VA does across a rent roll, the property management page covers the tenanted side of the fence, and the real estate page covers sales. The VA cost guide breaks down the full pricing model. Or skip ahead: book a discovery call with Jenn, who has personally run all 87-plus placements since 2024. Bring last month’s application count and your current days-vacant number, and she’ll tell you straight whether a VA moves either.