Real Estate VA: Property Onboarding, Purchasing & Reconciliation

REAL ESTATE VIRTUAL ASSISTANT: PROPERTY ONBOARDING, PURCHASING AND RECONCILIATION

Please read this whole post before applying. There are instructions at the bottom, and how you follow them is the first thing we look at.

ABOUT US

We run full-service, hands-off management for short-term rental owners across the US. An owner hands us an empty house. We furnish it, wire it, stock it, style it, photograph it, license it, connect it to the booking channels and open it to guests. Then our management team runs it.

That middle part is a project with about two hundred moving pieces and a hard finish line, and right now it lives almost entirely in our founder's head. That is the whole reason this seat exists. Most days are a spreadsheet, a vendor invoice, a receipt, a permit portal and a follow-up list.

We automate everything software can do. What software cannot do is notice that a vendor invoice and a card statement disagree by $16.48 and go find out why, or notice on day one that the internet install is booked eleven days out and the permit needs a floor plan that nobody has drawn yet.

We are growing. Our written plan is 150 managed doors by the end of 2027. This is the first seat of its kind here and it will not be the last one.

WHAT THIS ROLE REALLY IS

Two lanes, one person. Every case below is real. Money amounts are changed, for a reason we explain further down. The shapes are all real.

LANE ONE, THE RECORD OF THE MONEY.

Nineteen furniture lines on a live property are flagged as ordered. There is no order number behind any of them, no charge on any card, and no confirmation from the vendor. Either they were bought and nobody wrote it down, or somebody typed a word into the wrong cell. The difference is $4,318.62. If you place that order and it was already placed, the owner pays for the same furniture twice, and nobody finds out for a month.

- Two lines carry the same item name and two different product links, so the house is getting either four sofas or two, a $2,144.75 question, and the owner is reading it as one line.
- A vendor invoice hit the card as $9,340.55 on the 12th and another $812.07 on the 19th, because that vendor captures payment as items ship. The record held only the first number, so the property looked $812.07 cheaper than it was.
- A tax column on an Oregon delivery showed $22.50 per mattress and nothing on the other sixty items. That is not tax. It is a state recycling fee that is legitimately owed, and two people here have already gotten it wrong.
- A four-figure order shipped to one property's address and belonged to a different property's plan. The ship-to address is never the answer. The item list is.
- One plan column read $10,462.31 against an order total of $10,462.08. A twenty-three cent gap between two numbers computed from completely different inputs made the row look reconciled while the real figure underneath it sat $1,384.90 low.

LANE TWO, GETTING THE HOUSE TO THE FINISH LINE.

A house is furnished, wired, cleaned and photographed, and it still cannot take a guest, because the city permit needs a floor plan, the floor plan needs a measured scan nobody has ordered, and the internet install is booked eleven days out. Somebody has to know that on day one, not in week five.

- Four separate deliveries land at a vacant house in one week. Three arrive, one is refused at the curb for freight damage, and the replacement ships to the wrong state. A box left at the door of an empty house is nobody's until somebody is named, and you are the person who names them.
- A utility account is open, but it is in the previous owner's name, autopay is off, and we are not listed as an authorized contact, which means the day the power goes out nobody at that utility will speak to us.
- A city changes its short-term rental rules mid-project. The registration the property was counting on no longer exists and the path is now a discretionary hearing. Finding that out in week two is a plan change. Finding it out in week nine is a dead launch.
- The listing goes up with the nightly rate still on the platform's starter default, the maximum stay set to 365 nights, and the house rules field empty. Every one of those is a field somebody had to set, and nobody did.
- Eight vendors are needed before the first guest: cleaner, plumber, electrician, HVAC, handyman, landscaper, pool, pest. Sourcing them is the easy half. The hard half is that every one of those phone numbers has to be dialed once before we call it a directory.

The honest description of this role: it is detective work on money, and chasing on everything else. It is quiet and it is deliberate.

The person who is great at it is the person who genuinely cannot leave a number alone when it does not tie, who would rather spend forty minutes finding the missing $16.48 than type over the cell and move on, and who also will not let a utility company, a permit office or a busy designer go three days without an answer.

This is not task-list work. Nobody is going to send you a list each morning telling you which rows to price or which office to call. You run a weekly rhythm and a countdown you can read yourself, so you already know.

If that reads as tedious to you, we would genuinely rather you skip this one. If it reads as a puzzle with a deadline, keep going.

WHAT YOU WILL OWN

THE BUDGET RECORD. One Google Sheet per property, our launch budget tracker. It is the single record of what the property is buying, what it committed to, what actually got charged and what is left. Every property in flight has one and you run all of them.

- Price every row on the plan that has no price. Find the item, confirm the variant, the size and the pack quantity, and put a real number on it.
- Load the purchasing carts against the plan. This has real traps. Our cart holds a hard 50 lines, and line 51 silently pushes the oldest line out into Saved for later, so a 152 row accessories list is four separate orders and you d ---------- the batches up front. Re-adding an item that is already in the cart raises its quantity instead of warning you. You verify by item code and quantity, never by the badge in the corner.
- Tag every order back onto the plan rows it paid for, so nothing is bought that the sheet does not know about.
- Log every card charge as its own row, with the invoice's true order total rather than the first posting that showed up, and file the receipt the day it exists. A charge with no receipt cannot be cleanly billed back, which means a missing receipt is money the company cannot recover that month.
- Reconcile every vendor invoice against what we actually committed to, line by line, and produce the defect list. What was charged, what was ordered, what is missing, what does not agree, and which of those is a real problem versus a coi ---------- .
- Run the flag pass every Friday. Filter the exception column and clear everything that is not clean. Some of our checks run from scripts on our side and we run them against your sheet, so your pass has to be clean before it reaches them.
- Chase our designer for the receipts, the property attributions and the open answers that nobody else is going to chase. The buying happens in person, in other states, on a company card, and store receipts print department codes instead of product names, so only the person who was standing there can say which room a $340 receipt belongs to.
- Open a tracker for a new property from our template and type the house into the quantity calculator: bedrooms, beds by size, baths, sleeps, TVs, floors. Half the quantities calculate themselves off those numbers, so this is not data entry, it is the foundation. Every count comes from a written source, and when two written sources disagree you flag it instead of picking a winner.
- Watch the envelope. The plan has a cap, and the week you first see that the plan is going to cross it, you say so out loud. Weeks early, not at the end.
- Produce the close-out: the reconciliation that says whether the owner is owed a refund or owes a true-up, and the drafted invoice or refund figure behind it.

THE COUNTDOWN. From the day the management agreement is executed to the day our management team can run the house without you.

- The calendar itself. Every property on one board, every gate current, every date real. You own the answer to "where is this house and what is it waiting on," and you own it before anybody has to ask.
- Accounts and utilities. Every account to Active in the correct name, us named as an authorized contact with call-in and outage rights, autopay and paperless set, and the internet ordered with the install date captured the day it books. That date is the longest lead time in most launches.
- Licensing, permits and tax. Research the market's short-term rental rules and confirm the property qualifies before anyone spends money assuming it does. Assemble the permit application, including the floor plan. Open the portal account, submit, and track it to ISSUED. Send the neighbor notices where they are required. Get the permit number into every advertisement. Register the lodging and occupancy tax accounts and record which channel remits what.
- Insurance and the vendor bench. Chase the certificate of insurance and file it. Source and qualify the local vendor bench, capture after-hours rates, and get recurring landscaping, pool and pest started so the first visit lands before the first guest.
- The physical fate of every order. The delivery calendar, tracking numbers, backorders, what arrived, what did not, what arrived damaged, what got reshipped and when, what got returned.
- Listing provisioning. Import the property into our management system and map every field. Confirm the two-way calendar and rate sync. Connect our pricing tool. Connect our cleaning tool, assign the cleaner and apply the right checklist. Expand to the additional channels. Stage all of it and hand it to us to publish.
- The property record. The project folder, the property file, the contact list, the service directory, warranty registrations off the serial numbers collected during install, the placement map, opening inventory counts, and the archive when it closes.
- Owner logistics, and only logistics. Signature status, a utility account number, a certificate of insurance, an app invitation that has not been accepted. Chased under our name, never yours, and never carrying a number.
- The measurement. Days from signature to first booked night, per property, recorded. Nobody here has ever written that number down. You will be the first.

HELPING BUILD THE SYSTEM. We have a written playbook for this seat and we are still finishing the SOPs behind it. You will help write them, in your own words, out of the work you actually did. As we add properties this becomes more than one seat, and the person who runs it well is the person who trains the next one.

WHAT YOU WILL NOT DO, AND THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT SECTION IN THIS POST

Two walls. Both are deliberate, both are permanent, and neither bends for a deadline.

THE MONEY WALL: YOU OWN THE RECORD, YOU NEVER OWN THE MOVEMENT.

Nothing you do debits a bank, releases a wire, pays a card, or reaches an owner's inbox. Not once, not in an emergency, not on a deadline.

- You never fire a charge. Every single payment, card or eCheck or wire, is approved personally by our founder, on that specific charge, every time. There is no batch approval and there is no standing permission.
- You never move money out of any bank or merchant account. You compute what should be paid and you evidence it. He releases it.
- You do not place the orders. You build the cart, you verify it line by line, you hand it over with the batch, the total, the shipping address and the property reference it needs, and somebody else presses the button.
- You are not the property owner's contact. Not the approval schedule, not an invoice, not a refund figure, not an email with a number in it. You draft. We send. Always.
- You never add, edit or verify a vendor's bank details or payee information. Nobody in this seat does. That is the wall against invoice fraud, and urgency is the exact pretext it exists to defeat.
- You have no banking, no payment gateway and no accounting system access, on purpose. If you ever find that you somehow can reach one, you do not act, you report it.

THE BUILDING WALL: YOU RUN THE COUNTDOWN, YOU NEVER CERTIFY THE HOUSE.

You are remote. You will never stand in these houses. So there is a category of work that is structurally not yours, and we would rather you know that now than discover it in month two and feel set up to fail.

- You never certify a physical condition and you never sign a walkthrough. You schedule it, you receive its findings, you turn them into dispatched work and you track them to done. You do not perform it and you do not sign your name to it.
- You never name anyone, including yourself, as a city's required local contact. That is a legal representation about a person who can physically reach a property, and it is our founder's to make.
- You never publish a listing. You stage it completely, every field set. He calls go or no-go.
- A house being ready is not your call to make. You produce the evidence that it is. Somebody standing in it makes the call.

Read both walls as protection, not as distrust. The seat that keeps the record of the money is deliberately not the seat that moves it, because a record that can move money is not a record, it is an opinion. The seat that runs the countdown is deliberately not the seat that certifies the building, because a countdown that can declare itself finished is not a countdown. Those separations are what make your close-out number and your green light worth something, and they mean that when money or a guest goes somewhere it should not have, it is structurally impossible for it to have been you. We designed it that way on purpose, we will not ask you to bend it, and we think it is one of the best parts of the offer.

A WORD ABOUT CONFIDENTIALITY

You will see what we pay for goods and what the owner is billed for them. That information does not leave the company, ever, for any reason, including to an owner who asks you directly and including when they are being nice about it. If that is not a line you can hold comfortably, please do not apply. It is written into the agreement and we take it seriously.

The same applies in the other direction. You never structure anything: no splitting an order, sequencing a purchase, or shaping a number so it sits under a threshold. And no order, vendor or reimbursement that benefits you or anyone connected to you. Either one is immediate cause, even if the underlying purchase was perfectly fine.

MUST-HAVES

We are not going to write "detail oriented" here, because everybody says it about themselves and it predicts nothing. Here is what actually predicts success in this seat.

- 2+ years in a role where reconciling one document against another was the actual job. Accounts payable, bookkeeping, procurement, e-commerce operations, inventory control, order desk, audit support. Something where a number had to tie and you were the one who made it tie.
- You know that a total matching is not proof it is right. Two numbers built from completely different inputs can land within a dollar of each other by coi ---------- , look tied, and hide a four-figure error underneath. Somebody who checks totals and stops will not survive here.
- You understand that one number can arrive as several charges. A single vendor order can hit a card as three postings weeks apart. Log the first one and the record is quietly wrong forever, and nothing on the sheet will tell you.
- You chase small discrepancies to the bottom. If a total is off by $16.48, we need the person who finds the $16.48, not the person who adjusts the total.
- You can hold an open discrepancy without doing either wrong thing with it. The two failure modes are dropping it because it is small and inventing a reason for it because you want it closed. Both are worse than a note that says "unexplained, $16.48, chasing." If you have ever kept a variance open for two weeks because you refused to guess, tell us about it.
- You have run something with a deadline and many moving parts, and you can show us the instrument you ran it on. A launch, an onboarding, a move, an event, an implementation, a store opening. Not "I am organized." The actual tracker, board or sheet, and what you did the week it started slipping.
- You follow up politely and repeatedly with somebody who is busy, who is not your subordinate, and who has no reason to prioritize you. Utility companies, city permit offices, vendors, a designer in another state. This does not resolve itself and it is a large part of the job's value.
- You leave alone what you do not understand. Some of our sheets carry hand-marked rows whose meaning was never written down. Our standing rule is preserve, never interpret. A near-pattern is a trap, not a shortcut, and finishing one makes six edits nobody can undo.
- Real spreadsheet fluency, not "proficient in Excel" on a resume. SUMIFS, lookups, filters, spotting a hardcoded number sitting where a formula should be, and knowing what happens to a sheet when someone inserts a column into the middle of it. We will test this and it is not a hard test if this is true of you. You do not need to code.
- You can tell someone senior to you that a number is wrong, or that a date is not going to hold. Comfortably, in writing, with the evidence attached. Bad news early is the single most valuable thing you will ever send us.
- Stamina for a long pass. Some days are 150 rows of the same check. We need the 150th to get the same attention as the first.
- Honest. If you have not confirmed something, you say so. You never report a status you did not verify and you never invent a number, a price, a quantity, a receipt, a confirmation or which property a charge belongs to. "I do not know yet, here is how I am finding out" is always the right answer. This is the single most important item on this list and it is a hard gate at every stage of our process.
- Clear, professional written English. You will write to US vendors, US city offices and a US designer about money and deadlines.
- Stable power and internet, plus a backup for outages.
- Able to work the fixed shift below. Please read the hours section carefully before you apply.

NICE-TO-HAVES

- Property management, real estate operations, or short-term rental background.
- You have dealt with a government or municipal office and got a thing issued. Permits, licensing, registrations, business filings, customs, anything where a form met a bureaucracy and you won.
- Trade, wholesale or B2B purchasing account experience.
- You have reconciled a credit card statement against a set of vendor invoices and found something.
- You have chased a vendor for a credit and won.
- Bookkeeping exposure, QuickBooks or Xero or similar, even read-only.
- Furniture, interior design, hospitality FF&E, or construction procurement background.
- Experience with a property management system, a dynamic pricing tool, or a cleaning scheduling tool.
- You have built a tracker or a process that somebody else then used without you in the room.
- A little Google Apps Script or Python, or genuine curiosity about the scripts behind our sheets. Not required. Rewarded.

HOURS AND TIMEZONE

This is a fixed US business-hours shift. Please read the conversion below carefully.

- The shift is 8:00 AM to 4:00 PM US Pacific, Monday through Friday. Eight hours a day, forty hours a week. You are online and responsive for the whole of it.
- In the Philippines that is 11:00 PM to 7:00 AM, starting the following day. It is an overnight shift. Pacific is fifteen hours behind Manila in US daylight time, so an 8:00 AM Pacific start is 11:00 PM in Manila and a 4:00 PM Pacific finish is 7:00 AM in Manila. We are stating that plainly so nobody works out the math after they have accepted.
- The shift moves by one hour in Manila terms when the US changes to and from daylight saving time. The Pacific hours stay 8:00 AM to 4:00 PM.
- Why this window and not a later one. Half this job is other people's business hours. Utility companies, city permit offices, vendor support and freight carriers on the US East Coast close at 2:00 PM Pacific. This shift gives you six hours of overlap with them. A later shift would give you three, and you would spend your life waiting a day for every answer.
- Some deadlines in this job are actual dates. The Friday flag pass happens on Friday. Ordering deadlines and permit windows are the other kind, and they do not move.
- No weekends. No overnight emergencies outside your shift. Those stay with us.

Be honest with yourself about the overnight window before you apply. If 11:00 PM to 7:00 AM does not fit your life, please do not apply, and there is no hard feeling in that.

If you are somewhere other than the Philippines, do the conversion yourself and tell us on the form what 8:00 AM to 4:00 PM Pacific is where you are. We do read that answer.

COMPENSATION

- $1,000 per month, for the arrangement above.
- The rate is flat. It does not step up as the scope grows. We would rather say that plainly than describe an increase we have not committed to, so you can plan on this number.
- Merit review at 90 days after conversion, then annually. That is where the rate gets revisited.
- We honor 13th month pay. We offer flexible coordinated time off and we cover your equipment. We treat our people well and the good ones grow with us.
- Paid trial first. Before any ongoing offer there is a short paid project, a couple of hours of real work, and we pay you for it.
- The first four weeks are an Initial Evaluation Term at close to full rate, so both sides get a real look before anyone commits.

HOW WE HIRE

We use a multi-step process and it is deliberately demanding. Every stage is something you do on your own time, and we do not schedule a single call until you have already shown us how you work. In order: a short application form, a 2-minute video, a written reconciliation exercise, a personality assessment, then an interview and a paid trial. Budget roughly two to three hours of your own time across all of it before the paid trial, which we pay for. The personality assessment is a tiebreaker, not a gate, and nobody is rejected on it alone.

The reconciliation exercise is the stage that d ---------- this seat. It is a real invoice against a real plan with the names taken out, it does not tie, and the reason it does not tie is not the reason you will first think it is. There is no trick, but there is a wrong answer that most people give, and it is the confident one.

We move fast, and you set the pace. There is no application window and no waiting for a batch. Each stage unlocks the moment you finish the one before it, and every deadline is measured from when the email reaches you, not from a date on our calendar. Somebody who moves promptly can go from applying to a paid trial in a couple of weeks.

Deadlines are real at every stage. If you miss one, you are out. Please do not ask for an extension.

HOW TO APPLY

Fill out the form linked at the very bottom of this post.

Applications sent any other way will not be reviewed. Please do not message us on this platform, do not email us, and do not send a resume in a reply. Only form submissions are looked at. We know that is strict. It is the first filter and it is working as intended.

Read the form carefully. One of the questions is there to check that you read this post.

Apply here: ----------