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Why Your Next Leasing Agent Might Be a Bartender │ Nick Deveau, Co-Founder & CEO of GrottoAI

Summary

Nick Deveau is the co-founder and CEO of GrottoAI, a coaching tool that works alongside multifamily leasing teams on their calls and onsite tours, a first for the industry. Before GrottoAI, he spent nearly a decade building vertical AI across hiring, healthcare, and insurance, including the core technology behind EvolutionIQ's $730 million acquisition in late 2024, one of the first major vertical AI exits. He sits down with host Jacob Kosior to share what hundreds of thousands of leasing conversations say about what moves a prospect to lease, why the tour is the richest and most overlooked data source in leasing, and the half-trillion-dollar vacancy problem behind it all. Along the way they get into hiring for rapport over resumes, why leasing is sales, and what vertical AI sees that broad tools miss.

A burger is ten bucks. This is a twenty to thirty thousand dollar a year apartment. So, why is Burger King more on AI coaching than leasing teams?

In This Episode

Takeaways

  • Rapport on a tour is a coachable skill, not a fixed personality trait. Grotto works on the human coaching side of leasing, the in-person moments where an agent is face to face with a prospect. Analyzing hundreds of thousands of leasing interactions, it found that small relational moves, a shared laugh, genuine curiosity, asking about the person, track closely with whether someone signs. Agents who spark a moment of laughter on a tour are 48% more likely to turn that prospect into a signed lease. For operators, the encouraging part is that these are skills you can measure and coach.
  • The tour is the most valuable data source you're not using. A tour runs 10 to 15 times longer than any other interaction with a prospect, often 30 to 45 minutes one on one, and historically none of it was visible. Captured at scale, it stops being a leasing tool and becomes asset-management intelligence: the objections that keep surfacing, what renters value, and what to build or fix next.
  • Your next great leasing hire might come from a bar, not a leasing office. The traits that win a tour, warmth and curiosity, show up everywhere in hospitality. In a tight labor market, the first instinct is to get more selective, but some of the best operators are doing the opposite: bringing in relationship builders from restaurants, bars, and hotels, people with no leasing background who can ramp into the industry fast. One new hire reached the top decile at her company in two weeks.‍
  • Behind all of it is a half-trillion-dollar problem. Nick frames leasing through the lens of vacancy loss: empty units between residents cost the industry around $30 billion a year in lost rent and roughly half a trillion in destroyed property value. It's the clearest case for treating the leasing conversation as a financial asset, not an afterthought.