Agency VA or hire someone direct off a marketplace for my first assistant?

Question

I've been reading both sides of this for a week and I genuinely can't tell which way to go for a first hire.

The agency route: they recruit, they've already trained the person on real estate vocabulary, there's a replacement if it doesn't work, and I get one invoice. Quotes I've collected sit around $10 to $14 an hour for part time. Somebody manages the person other than me.

The direct route: I post on a marketplace, screen people myself, and pay maybe $5 to $7 an hour for someone with decent English and no real estate background. That's roughly half the cost, and the money that would have been the agency's margin goes into paying my person more than their local market rate, which people tell me buys loyalty. The cost is that recruiting, training, payment logistics, and every quality problem land on me, and I've never managed anyone remote.

The argument I keep running into against myself is that I don't know what good looks like yet, so I can't screen for it, and the agency is basically selling me that judgment. The counterargument is that I'll never learn what good looks like if someone else does the picking, and my first hire is when it's cheapest to make that mistake.

Where do people here land, and did the answer change once you had two or three people instead of one?

tylerbrooks9 · Accepted Answer

First hire, agency, and I say that as someone who wants the cheap boring version of everything.

The reason isn't the training or the vocabulary, both of which are thinner than agencies imply. It's that a first hire fails maybe half the time for reasons that have nothing to do with the person, and the agency absorbs the restart. You get a replacement in two weeks instead of spending three weekends reposting and re-interviewing while your actual work piles up. You're paying roughly $4 an hour of premium for that. On 15 hours a week that's $260 a month, which is a fair price for not doing recruiting twice.

Where it flips is the second and third hire. By then you know what the tasks are, you've got recordings and a checklist, and you can tell in a 20 minute call whether someone can follow one. That's when direct hiring starts to make sense, because you're only buying labor at that point and you already own the training. A few people I know keep one agency seat permanently as overflow and hire the rest direct, which seems sensible.

One thing to check in whatever agency contract you sign: what happens if you want to bring that person on directly later. Some agreements price that, some forbid it for a period. Read that clause before you get attached to the person.

Agency VA or hire someone direct off a marketplace for my first assistant?

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