Carrie Gable works nationwide without ever needing to leave her suburban Chicago office.

As the owner of RealSupport, Inc., a virtual assistant company in Palatine, Ill., Gable and her staff of five assist real estate clients — from California to New York — with tasks ranging from marketing to web design.

“Before, to do business in real estate, you made a brochure and made a few phone calls,” Gable said. “Now you need a website, and if you have properties listed, you need to be marketing those on every real estate portal that’s out there. That takes a tremendous amount of time and training.”

As the Internet becomes an integral part of marketing and the economy slows, some businesses are choosing to hire virtual assistants, who work remotely for multiple clients, instead of onsite assistants as a way to cut costs and work more effectively.

There are no statistics monitoring the number of virtual assistants in the U.S., but one company, Team Double-Click, Inc., claims a pool of more than 20,000 virtual assistants. Gable said her business gets three to four new client leads per week.

“Technology is making virtual assistants more viable for sure, but for real estate and general small business and entrepreneurs, the need now is so much greater because there is so much more to do,” she said.

A large part of Gable’s business focuses on website management and marketing for her approximately 55 real estate clients, but virtual assistants can handle other tasks including data entry, phone answering, cold calling and more, said Sue Kramer, director of marketing for the International Virtual Assistant Association.

Before starting RealSupport in 2000, Gable worked corporate jobs at advertising and management companies in Chicago, where she discovered that “we didn’t have enough work to hire on another employee, but had enough that we needed consistent people to outsource to.”

That need, she said, fuels her real estate-focused virtual assistant business.

“A lot of people don’t realize that although real estate agents work for a big firm, they are independent contractors,” she said.

Instead of hiring an onsite assistant that needs training, office supplies and insurance coverage, specialized virtual assistants cover their own expenses and are ready for action immediately Kramer said.

Because Gable focuses on the real estate niche, her staff commands expertise and higher rates. Prices for virtual services vary but range from $40 to $70 per hour.

A niche focus also helps develop new clients in a business often dependent on referrals and word of mouth promotion. Real estate professionals, she said, often communicate through referral and social networks. That’s why clients in New York can refer the company to clients in Washington, D.C.

Gable’s clients are mostly from the East Coast, although the company added about 6 new ones from the Midwest in 2007.

“I’m sure there are still VAs out there that try to be all things to everybody, but they’re going to eventually fall into a niche, just kind of intuitively,” Gable said.

Many virtual assistants are home-based, self-employed workers that enjoy the flexibility of working from home, but Gable loves the excitement of growing a business. Her company has a physical office and employees that works standard business hours.

“When I started in this business, I was working 24/7. I was working whenever they wanted, whenever they needed me,” Gable said. “With the tremendous growth we received and the amount of new business, we can kind of dictate who we take.”

But the business does have its challenges. For one, constant education and certification is necessary to stay on top of industry trends. Blogging, for instance, has become a buzz in real estate, so her company started its own.

The biggest challenge may be helping clients understand the concept of a virtual assistant and how communication can be done entirely through phone, fax or e-mail.

“Some people literally can’t get their head around how this team in Palatine that they can’t see, feel or touch can help,” she said.

Many of those clients could really benefit from a virtual assistant, including non-real estate workers like speakers, consultants, insurance professionals and legal professionals.

“It’s a hard concept for a lot of people to get,” Gable said. “Those who get it love it and are crazy about the fact that they can outsource their work to us and focus on their business.”