LockedOn Virtual Assistant: a VA who keeps the matches, the follow-up and the anniversary letters going out

You search “lockedon virtual assistant” at 9:40 on a Tuesday night, because the CRM you bought to make prospecting automatic turned out to need an operator. The anniversary letters have not gone out since March. Saturday’s open home attendees are still in your phone, not the database. And the buyer match you meant to run on the new listing is three days old, which in real estate is a different thing from fresh.

We see exactly who lands here. A recent enquiry was a couple opening their own sales agency in Queensland, LockedOn at the centre, Pricefinder, Real Time Agent and Realtair around it, both principals needing to be out listing and selling and neither with a spare hour for data entry. That is the LockedOn owner in miniature: the tool is genuinely built for the long game of database farming, and the long game is the first thing that dies when the people running it are also the people selling.

The daily rhythm a VA runs in your LockedOn

Monday morning is the weekend harvest. Every open home attendee goes into LockedOn as a proper contact, not a name scrawled on a sign-in sheet: phone, email, which property, what they said about price. Feedback gets logged against the listing while it is still legible, the same-day thank-you and price-feedback messages go out by SMS and email, and the handful of genuine buyers get flagged for the agent to ring personally. The lookers are not discarded; they go onto the right nurture track, because half of this year’s lookers are next year’s vendors.

When a listing goes live, the buyer match runs. LockedOn will surface every contact whose recorded requirements fit the property, and this is where the system either shines or embarrasses you, because the match reads the brief someone typed in, not the conversation the agent remembers. So your VA records each buyer’s price range, suburbs and non-negotiables properly at the point of entry, keeps them current as buyers change their minds, and when the match list comes back, works it, calls, texts and emails down the list while the listing is still news rather than letting the hottest audience in your database find the property on realestate.com.au like a stranger.

Through the week, the vendor report builds itself, or rather, the VA builds it continuously so it never has to be built in a panic. Enquiry counts, inspection numbers, buyer feedback and campaign activity get entered against each listing as they happen, and before your vendor call the report is assembled and ready. Any agent will tell you the price conversation is the hardest one in the job; it goes very differently when it opens with evidence.

Campaigns run on schedule instead of on guilt. Just listed and just sold drops go to the matched segment around each property, listing updates go to the active buyer pool, the monthly database email actually leaves on time, and each send goes to a filtered, deliberate list. The prospecting layer is the part almost every agency owns and almost none operates: purchase anniversary letters queued and personalised so past clients hear from you on the date that matters to them, past appraisals resurfaced for a check-in, street lists pulled after a sale for the just-sold drop. This work never feels urgent on any given day, which is exactly why it needs to be somebody’s actual job.

Underneath all of it sits the database hygiene pass. Duplicates merged carefully, disconnected mobiles and bouncing emails cleared, owner-to-property links checked, categories kept honest. LockedOn’s matching, its automations and its letters all draw from this one well, and every fancy feature in the product is only ever as good as the record underneath it.

The honest bit

LockedOn automates the sending, not the thinking. An automated workflow will keep firing on schedule whether the data feeding it is right or wrong, which means a workflow running over a dirty database is a machine for embarrassing you efficiently: the anniversary letter to the couple who divorced and sold, the just-listed SMS to the vendor of the listing. The automation features are genuinely useful, and they are precisely why the hygiene work matters more in LockedOn, not less. Someone has to enrol contacts on the right tracks, check what each sequence actually sent, and pause the ones that have gone stale.

The buyer match is a query, not a mind-reader. If briefs are entered as “looking in the area, flexible on price”, the match list will be everyone and therefore no one. The fix is discipline at data entry, which is cheap when it is a VA’s core job and expensive when it is an agent’s afterthought.

And LockedOn is one tool in a stack, not the whole agency. Trust money is one place the boundary is about the licence, not the software: LockedOn connects to Guardian by Inhabit for trust accounting, and that module stays a licensee function a VA never touches. Appraisals lean on Pricefinder, digital signing and auctions happen in tools like Realtair and Real Time Agent, and the portals have their own back ends. A VA can work across the admin of that stack, but the account connections, subscriptions and integrations are agency-level property that stay in the principal’s hands, and if something in the plumbing between systems breaks, we flag it the day we hit it rather than working around it silently.

What stays with you

Real estate is a licensed occupation and the line is not negotiable. Price guidance and appraisal figures, the advice you give a vendor or a buyer, offer handling and negotiation, anything touching an agency agreement or a contract of sale: all of it stays with the licensed agent. The trust account is the hardest line of all. If trust accounting runs through LockedOn’s Guardian by Inhabit integration, the VA’s login never extends to it: no VA operates a trust account, and no VA authorises a trust movement, ever.

For a Queensland agency there is a compliance layer on top, appointment paperwork and record-keeping under the state’s rules, and the honest division of labour is this: a VA can do the admin around compliance, keeping records complete, preparing the paperwork pack for a new appointment so every field is ready for review, diarising the renewals, but reviewing and signing is licensee work and stays that way. The same logic every licensed state applies. Inside LockedOn the boundary is enforced by access rather than trust: the VA’s standard user login covers contacts, listings, marketing and reporting, while admin settings, billing, integrations and user management stay with you. Anything that arrives in the database sounding like a complaint, a legal question or a contract matter escalates to the agent under a written rule.

What it costs and where to start

LockedOn admin sits on the admin tier, $12-17 AUD an hour excl GST, and most agencies land at 10-15 hours a week, roughly $500-1,100 a month, enough to cover the Monday harvest, the match runs, vendor report assembly, campaign scheduling and a weekly hygiene pass. Heavier work such as campaign strategy or custom reporting moves to the specialist tier at $18-25. Placement takes 7-10 business days, the first 5-7 days are supervised inside your LockedOn before any solo work, the $500 deposit refunds or credits to your first month, and the 30-day recalibrate-or-replace guarantee plus 14 days notice means the risk of trying it is genuinely small.

The real estate page covers the wider industry picture, including where a VA fits around your portals and signing tools, and if you buy rather than sell, the buyers agents page is the better read. The data entry task page shows how we run the unglamorous layer that everything else depends on, and the VA cost guide has the full pricing breakdown. Otherwise book a discovery call with Jenn, who has placed 87+ VAs into Australian businesses since 2024 and will tell you plainly if your database is too small to justify the hours yet. Bring your duplicate count and the date your last anniversary letter actually went out. That is usually the whole business case.