Most real estate agents hit a ceiling not because of their market, skills, or work ethic, but because of how they spend their time. Answering emails, scheduling showings, and managing paperwork leaves little room for growth. The solution is delegation, but many agents find that handing tasks to a virtual assistant (VA) often backfires. Justin Nimergood, founder of Top Gun Team at Epique Realty in Southlake, Texas, argues that the standard approach to VA support is flawed and offers a different path: investing a full year in training a VA from scratch.
According to Nimergood, most VA arrangements fail because assistants arrive with minimal training. "The level of training that a lot of these agencies get is very basic, very minimal," he says. "They are task-oriented. High repetition, task-oriented things. And that is really offering very minimal lift in terms of the services they are providing." As a result, agents still handle complex tasks, and the cognitive load remains unchanged. The agent stays the bottleneck.
To break this cycle, Nimergood trained his own VA for an entire year before letting any team member use that resource. "I trained him because only I can train him the way that I want to operate my business," Nimergood explains. "I knew in order to have the best VA supporting the best team, I had to take the time to hand-hold him and teach him everything." This process required documenting workflows and articulating standards clearly. Most team leaders would not invest that time, but the payoff is a VA capable of handling genuinely complex work.
The result is a structural shift in how Nimergood operates. He now focuses solely on commission-generating activities—listing appointments, showings, negotiations, and relationship-building. "If it is not a commission-generating activity, I am focused at the highest level," he says. "That is where someone who is a team lead should be." Everything else is delegable, freeing up hours previously lost to administrative tasks.
Nimergood's approach highlights a broader lesson for team leaders: building proper delegation infrastructure takes time upfront but pays long-term dividends. "The agents who figure this out earlier are the ones who scale," he notes. "The ones who keep doing everything themselves stay busy, but they do not build anything." In an industry where time is the most valuable asset, learning to delegate effectively may be the key to breaking through the ceiling.
