REI Forms Live Virtual Assistant: a VA who drafts the agreement before you've parked the car

Nobody looks up “rei forms live virtual assistant” while things are calm. You look it up on a Tuesday night with three tenancy agreements to draft, an exclusive agency agreement the vendor expected this morning, an entry notice that has to go out with the right notice period, and the quiet realisation that the only person in the office who knows where the templates live is you.

A quick naming note first, because the platform wears two badges. Dynamic Methods builds the engine; the real estate institutes in NSW, QLD, WA, SA, the NT, Tasmania and the ACT offer it to members as REI Forms Live, and Victoria gets the same thing as Forms Live. Under those two names it is the default forms layer of Australian real estate: about 7,000 agencies and 50,000 agents putting more than 600,000 transactions a month through it. Which means the workflows a VA runs in it are utterly standard across the industry. What is not standard is having someone with the hours to run them.

Because here is the thing about a forms platform: it holds every approved form your state institute publishes, it keeps them current when legislation moves, it eSigns, it shares, it archives. What it does not do is fill anything in. Every agreement still starts with a person opening the template, entering the details, checking the special conditions and pressing send. In most small agencies that person is the principal or the property manager, at night, and that is the job a VA takes.

The daily rhythm a VA runs in your REI Forms Live

Start with the sales side, because it is where speed is money. Your agent wins a listing at a 10am appraisal and messages through the basics: names, address, commission as quoted, the marketing schedule the vendor agreed to. By early afternoon the VA has the exclusive agency agreement drafted on the state-approved form from your saved agency template, the schedule attached, and the whole thing routed to the vendor for eSigning, with the signing order set correctly when there are two owners on title. The agent reviews it on their phone before it goes. A vendor who signs the authority the same day they said yes is a vendor who never spends the weekend being appraised by your competitor.

Then the property management side, which is less glamorous and more relentless. New leases and renewals get built on the current state tenancy form, your standard special conditions pulled in from the template rather than retyped from the last lease with last tenant’s dog clause still in it, and the bond paperwork prepared alongside where the state form set includes it. Entry notices go out with the correct minimum notice period for your state, batched sensibly so routine inspections are not generating one-off scrambles. When rent falls behind, the notice to remedy breach is drafted with the dates and particulars laid out, sitting ready for your property manager to check and serve. The VA prepares the notice; the PM makes the call.

Around all of it runs the execution tracking, which is the part owners consistently underestimate. Sent is not signed. The VA watches the eSigning envelopes each morning, spots the vendor who opened the agreement Tuesday and stalled at the commission page, nudges politely, and escalates to the agent when a nudge is not enough. When a contract needs to reach the vendor’s conveyancer or solicitor, it goes through the platform’s form sharing rather than as a PDF attachment forwarded four times, so everyone works from the live version and the agency keeps the audit history.

And then the closing of the loop, the bit that saves you in a dispute two years later: once every party has signed, the VA finalises the form so it locks, downloads the executed copy with its signing certificate, and files both against the property in your CRM or document system. The careful data entry behind that filing is dull beyond description, and it is exactly what stands between your agency and an afternoon of panic when a tribunal hearing asks for the executed lease and the signed condition report.

One more layer, weekly rather than daily: template housekeeping. State forms change when legislation does, and the institutes push updated versions through the platform. Your VA keeps your agency templates current, flags drafts sitting on a superseded version, and rebuilds them on the new form before they go anywhere near a signature. It takes twenty minutes a week and it is precisely the sort of maintenance that never happens when the templates belong to whoever is busiest.

The honest bit

Some plain truths about the platform, because you should hear them before a placement rather than after.

It is a forms library and an eSigning pipe, not a workflow engine. It will not notice that a lease expires in six weeks, will not decide that an entry notice is due, and will not chase a slow signatory beyond its automatic reminders. The triggers live in your CRM, your PM software and your VA’s checklist, and the forms platform is where the resulting work gets done. That is not a flaw; it is a division of labour, but it means the VA’s routine matters more than the software’s features.

The state structure is real. Each account hangs off a state institute’s approved form library, so an agency operating across borders runs separate accounts with separate form sets, and Victoria’s version answers to a different name entirely. A VA who covers your NSW and Queensland rent rolls keeps both straight, but the platform will not stop you drafting the wrong state’s form if you are moving fast at 9pm. A second set of eyes, working methodically in daylight hours, will.

eSigning is a paid add-on. Signing credits are purchased by the agency, so the VA queues and routes but the spend decision is yours, and the occasional signatory who refuses to sign electronically still means a printed copy and a human with a pen, which the VA coordinates and cannot conjure away.

And prefill is only as good as the source. Where your CRM or property management platform connects to the forms account, details carry across and drafting gets genuinely fast; where the CRM record is stale, the form inherits the mistake with impressive efficiency. A misspelt vendor name in the database becomes a misspelt vendor name on a legal document, now with a signature under it. Which is why forms work and database tidiness tend to travel together in the same placement, and why the first fortnight of one usually includes some quiet cleanup of the records the forms draw from.

What stays with you

Real estate agency work is licensed in every state this platform serves, and the forms it produces are legal documents, so the line is drawn hard and in your favour. The VA populates, routes, tracks and files. Your licensed people decide. That means commission and fee terms are set by the agent and only transcribed by the VA; price guidance, vendor advice and negotiation never move; special conditions beyond your approved standard set go to your solicitor, because drafting novel contract terms is legal work, not admin; the decision to serve a breach notice or end a tenancy sits with your property manager under your licensee’s supervision; and anything touching the trust account, authorisation, receipting, reconciliation, is not VA work in any form, ever.

The platform makes the boundary easy to keep. Every user works under their own login, so each draft, edit, share and signature request in a form’s history carries the VA’s name, your templates hold the approved wording so standard clauses are reused rather than improvised, and account administration, billing and user management stay with your admin. An agreement leaves the building only after your agent has reviewed it. The VA’s job is to make sure that review is the only thing standing between a won appraisal and a signed authority.

What it costs and where to start

Forms administration sits on the admin tier at $12-17 AUD an hour excl GST. Drafting and execution tracking alone rarely fills a week, so most agencies build it into a 10-15 hour placement, around $500-1,100 a month, where the same VA also runs the CRM, the inbox and the new-landlord and new-vendor onboarding emails that surround every agreement. Placement takes 7-10 business days, the first 5-7 days are supervised inside your account with your templates before anything is drafted solo, the 30-day guarantee lets you recalibrate or replace, and 14 days notice is the only exit condition.

For the wider picture, the real estate industry page covers how a VA fits a sales office and the property management page covers the rent-roll side, while the VA cost guide breaks down pricing in full. When you are ready, book a discovery call with Jenn, who has placed 87+ VAs into Australian businesses since 2024 and will say so plainly if a forms VA is not your first hire. Bring the agreement you drafted at 9pm last week and the list of envelopes still waiting on a signature. That is usually where the hours are hiding.