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Grotto AI's Nick Deveau on leasing as sales, why coaching beats scoring, asking for the application twice, and Hillpointe's 27% conversion lift.
Modern Multifamily is an interview-style podcast where we talk with leaders across the Multifamily industry about ways we can keep moving it forward. Topics include and are not limited to: technology, innovation, proptech, and improving renter experiences with a focus on positive impacts on both industry operators and suppliers.
Modern Multifamily - Nick Deveau
Recorded September 2026
Nick Deveau: Human behavior change is really freaking hard. It's not just like changing the prompt on an LLM and getting a new output. This is a really, really difficult problem. And so I'm trying to usher in this discussion around a new category, which is almost like this operating system to really ensure quality and consistency across your human workforce. And as more stuff and interactions get automated, I think the importance of the human interactions is going to be almost laid bare.
Mike Wolber: Nick, welcome to Modern Multifamily.
Nick Deveau: Great to be here.
Mike Wolber: Looking forward to digging in with you today. And before we talk about Grotto and the founder story, I actually just want to start with recent news. We were just at Blueprint together in Las Vegas. How was the show for you and the team?
Nick Deveau: Yep, it was great. It was really productive. It's the largest team that we've ever brought to a conference. We're a young company and the go-to-market side of the house is getting larger. We brought a new team member who is a hire from industry. He was a leasing consultant, and we felt like we really wanted that kind of blood and that expertise on our team. He's gonna be helping out with, you know, training up new partners, new users on Grotto and sort of spreading the Grotto gospel. And it was an awesome kind of crash course in that for him. And overall, yeah, lots of great meetings with current partners, future partners, got to meet some interesting vendors, thought about interesting partnerships, ways that we could play with the ecosystem. Really productive, really tiring. But yeah, it was great. I have my voice back today.
Mike Wolber: Yeah, I am feeling both fried and energized, and hopefully this is the last call for you on a Friday.
Nick Deveau: Yep, yep.
Mike Wolber: Well, hey, let's talk a little bit about the Grotto gospel. I'm always eager when I talk to a founder, Nick, just to hear the founder story. I've never founded a company. I hope I never do. And I always just want to understand the how, the why, where it came from. I know it takes a while to find traction, which you guys are finally seeing. So I'd love for you to start us from the beginning. Talk to us about the story of Grotto AI.
Nick Deveau: Yeah, definitely. You should try founding a company at some point. It's fun. It's fun. Yeah, so I can start quickly with my background. It kind of sets the stage for how I ended up here. I've spent my entire career, which is the past decade, building B2B vertical AI, which at this point is a meme. I say that all the time, but it wasn't in 2016 when I started. I started my career building AI for hiring, which is actually in some ways strangely close to where we are today in terms of thinking about human performance and all this. It was an AI screening platform for mostly Fortune 500 companies. I led the machine learning and data science team there for a number of years, then went to grad school for biomedical informatics after that. That was really to pivot into AI for healthcare, which is something I had always wanted to do. That first year at the AI hiring company was supposed to be a gap year before med school. I thought I wanted to be a physician, but I just ended up falling in love with, I mean, not just data and machine learning, but company building and startups and all that. And so I went to be the founding engineer at a mental health tech company after grad school, which was awesome, a phenomenal mission. And then after that I went to lead the medical AI team at an insurance tech company. And the theme across all of these is building AI in large, kind of slow-moving, highly regulated, more conservative industries where, you know, just a good product alone doesn't do the job. The product has to be great, but you've got to understand teams, change management, how to get people to adopt your technology. So that's the background on myself before Grotto.
The story with Grotto: at that point I'd done a bunch of early and growth stage startups, and I said, I want to create one myself. What am I going to be uniquely suited to build? And it was some sort of data company. AI was kind of getting hot at this point, but I really wanted to build something that was generating really unique proprietary data. That was the theme. All the companies I had worked at did that to some extent. And I think, you know, now at the push of a button you can build any feature or any piece of software. What makes something a little more defensible? It's having really unique data. And we can get into the data in a sec. So I said, I want to build that sort of company. And I'm a New Yorker. I love residential real estate. I think you either hate it or you love it here, and I love it. And I said, what is sort of enterprise residential real estate? It's multifamily. I got connected to some really smart folks in multifamily and I just asked them all, what's the biggest problem in this industry? Everyone said some version of vacancy loss, which prompted me and then my co-founder Ben to go out and ask, why are units vacant? Is it leasing, is it renewals, is it the resident experience? We saw a lot of traction on the leasing side, specifically the in-person, human moments. There's no shortage of automated lead nurturing solutions and automation solutions, but there was nothing supporting the human-to-human moments. So we've leaned in there, and that was the genesis for Grotto.
Mike Wolber: And was that something that you did research on and found product-market fit relatively quickly, or was there a stumbling series of steps to get from realizing there was an opportunity here to actually starting to rev on the product itself?
Nick Deveau: Yeah, I mean, if I think way back, the really original thing that we were going to build was some sort of tech to predict renewals and sort of manage the turn better, which, by the way, I still think is an interesting idea. But the feedback I got around it was, look, people have tried this and the data just doesn't exist there. And I'm like, okay, again, we need new data, we need to collect new stuff. There was also just more market pull on the leasing side. So our first customer ever was Weidner Apartment Homes, a big owner-operator out of the Pacific Northwest. We built a piece of software called Call Guidance for their contact center. It's basically real-time sales coaching in the middle of a call, so it's prompting their contact center, kind of hand-holding them through sales best practices in real time. It's still deployed there, we still sell it, and it's an awesome product. But I think pretty quickly we said, what's the crazy idea after this? And it was tours. How do we supercharge not just phone calls, but the in-person tour?
Mike Wolber: Cool. So at this point, September 2026, you are helping marketing and operating teams accelerate and improve the experience from that first contact at tour all the way through becoming a happy resident at the community.
Nick Deveau: Yeah. Yeah.
Mike Wolber: The thing I want to dig into next is this age-old debate of demand versus conversion. I think it's very natural for us to be behind our targets, you know, around vacancy or even lease expiration schedules, and to think that we have to spend more, hopefully spend surgically, in order to improve the demand profile so that we can have more shots on goal. Yet as a sales leader myself, I typically zoom back and want to understand: do I have a pipeline problem, or do I have a sales acceleration problem? And I feel like you're really helping teams codify this and understand where to focus. Are you seeing it this way? How are you showing up with customer engagement to help them rethink how they can spend their time, money and resources?
Nick Deveau: Yeah, I mean, we've talked about this before. If you think about a software company, or lots of types of companies, any company that sells something, if they're not hitting their targets, they look at demand, they look at pipeline for sure. But they also look at how they're converting their pipeline. What are they doing? How are they handling these processes? And if I think about our pipeline at Grotto, when we're behind, which, you know, I hope we're not usually, but also if you're not behind, you're not setting big enough goals, so it feels like you're often behind, what I think about 80% of the time is how can we handle these processes better, not how do we build more pipeline. And I think in leasing, for whatever reason, and it probably just has to do with there not being the tools or the processes to really invest in the human nurturing of a lead, that resulted in an emphasis on the tech and the solutions that could increase top of funnel, because down funnel was treated more as this fixed thing, right? It just existed. It was an engine that ran at 70%, but we didn't really know how to make it run at 100%. I don't think people were actively saying, let's not focus on it. I just don't think there were tools that really enabled people to get good ROI out of their time when they focused on it.
Mike Wolber: I almost think of this like blind spots, right? You have certain things you can't see or you're not aware of. And if you're not seeing them, you're not even thinking about it. But a tool like Grotto can come in and show you, hey, here are some best practices that we really recommend. Here are some worst practices; don't do these things. And all of a sudden there's an uplift. So I really think this is going to be an opportunity for the industry to open up their eyes to how much room there is within their control to really improve conversion, propensity to not just show up for the tour, but to make that desirable next step. And in several mutual meetings we had this week at Blueprint, I think we also got a lot of resonance on this: we know marketing, but we do not know sales. Help us close the gap.
Nick Deveau: Yeah, yeah. I think "leasing is sales" as a concept is an idea that, even when we started the company in January 2025, wasn't as prevalent as it is today. There were maybe a few partners or potential partners that we spoke to at the time that called their leasing teams sales teams or a sales organization. That has really increased if we bring that up to today. Companies are reorging their leasing orgs around sales; they're treating it as such. And I think it's interesting. It's not like visibility didn't exist into this. There have always been mystery shops, and there's always been a coaching feedback loop, which is: okay, you go shop, you figure out what the issues are based off of one shop per quarter, and that is an input into learning and development processes. We work closely with the L&D teams at a lot of our partners. They are awesome people who have almost been malnourished by the lack of data that they had, right? Because they were just relying on the shop. So there was a little bit of visibility. People knew there was a problem, but there was just nothing that allowed them to coach up and supercharge the workforce based off of a lot of data, and not just anecdotes.
Mike Wolber: Well, it seems to me like you guys have an opportunity to be part of this early set of technologists that are really going to be creating this new category around sales and leasing intelligence. And, you know, I oftentimes pull inspiration from enterprise tech, where we spend our money as a tech operator. And I look at companies like Gong or Clari or Outreach that have really helped companies codify revenue intelligence as this new category. Are you seeing it that way? There's this opportunity to create a new category within our space, which kind of feels like a once-in-a-career opportunity.
Nick Deveau: Yeah, I think "Gong for leasing" is the one-liner, and it's a great jumping-off point. It certainly makes sense. We give visibility into every interaction, we coach up interactions, we can identify common objections and figure out the right way to handle them, and we can look at top performers and say, this is how your top performers handle objections or even just close better; let's scale that out to an entire workforce. I think the interesting thing is there are a few places where I would say we even build on Gong as a concept. The first is, you know, we deliver really, really active coaching. We're not just a visibility platform or an observability platform or an intelligence platform. We do all that stuff. But coaching, even versus scoring, we talk about this a lot. Scoring is something you can do with a transcript and Claude today, right? That's not a product. We can't charge what we do for that. Scoring is just a little bit of what we do. Coaching is this active, really involved, you know, 10-step process if you really break it out, that goes from analyzing a conversation to diagnosing the issues, figuring out what people did great, turning that into feedback, and then delivering that feedback in the best possible way to maximize learning retention. And with platforms like Gong and some other sales intelligence platforms, I mean, you know this, right? You probably do this with your team. You'll go into Gong and say, hey, this was great, and you'll bring those sorts of things up in a one-on-one or something. And that works in an enterprise environment because the ratio of manager to employee and the value of the accounts justifies that time. Leasing is much higher volume. It's not low account value, but it's much higher volume and slightly lower account value. And by the way, the managers are focused on a hundred other things besides just coaching up their teams, right? And so there needed to be something that was a little more automated, still very much human in the loop, but something that could keep up with the pace of deals, of leases, and take work off people's plates. And so that's really where we leaned in and went from just an intelligence and visibility platform to this thing that actively learns what great looks like and automatically scales it.
Mike Wolber: Well, it's cool. You hit on a couple of things that are really timely to me. One is that it's not just leasing teams reporting into the property manager anymore. You're actually seeing corporate VPs of sales coming into some of these big third-party management companies where they do run it like a sales culture. They're raising private equity capital, they're doing presidents' clubs, they're managing to pipeline, but they're still blind on some of the on-site leasing data. And to your point, we're a Gong customer. It's my third company in a row where I've deployed it. I can pretty quickly look at a seller and be like, wow, your patience is really, really low. You've got to wait more than a second before you engage, because typically people aren't done talking before you jump in. Or your question rate is way too low; you do not ask enough questions. Or the talk ratio is broken, brother. You're talking 70% of the time. You've got to flip the script. So patience, questions, talk ratios. And I think all of that stuff is just going to open up in our industry because of what you're doing.
Nick Deveau: Yeah, no, totally. And you asked about the category that we're trying to create. There's sales coaching and intelligence, which, if you ask me in one sentence how we describe what we do, is what I would say. But really, the way I'm thinking about what we're building is as a counterposition to a lot of the full automation. So there's automation, which is awesome. It has saved a ton of hours. It's really useful. I use it all the time in my own work, of course. That's a category, and that's kind of what has been sold to the world, right? That's the narrative most people think about when they think about AI. What we're trying to build is this engine to drive human performance at scale, right? And it's a hard problem. It's a messy problem. Human behavior change is really freaking hard. It's not just like changing the prompt on an LLM and getting a new output. This is a really, really difficult problem. And so I'm trying to usher in this discussion around a new category, which is almost like this operating system to really ensure quality and consistency across your human workforce. And as more stuff and interactions get automated, I think the importance of the human interactions is going to be almost laid bare, right? It's going to become really clear when they're great and when they're not. And we want to be the system that powers those.
Mike Wolber: I love it. Well, what are some of the things, when you engage with a future partner or in your early couple of calls with an existing partner, that you're seeing teams just missing? I'd love some free advice for people listening. What are some of those obvious, or maybe even non-obvious, things that a lot of leasing teams are missing today when it comes to the fundamentals?
Nick Deveau: Yeah. None of this is probably going to be super surprising, but obviously we're able to drive the consistency of the behavior, so I'll just say what we see all the time. Ask for the application, right? A lot of times that does not happen. We've looked at the data. Younger leasing agents are worse at asking for the application than older ones. I don't know if it's a generational thing, but it's just something to know. And by the way, asking for an application works. There's a way to do this that doesn't feel like high-pressure sales; it's just making the ask in a respectful way at the right moment. And then if they object, and this is point number two, just ask again. Again, not high-pressure sales, but just try again. Find the right moment, maybe close to the end of the tour. So asking for the application, and then re-asking when you don't get a yes the first time, really, really helps. That really improves conversion. We just had a pilot where, over the course of the pilot, we increased the application ask rate from, I think, 35% to almost 70%, so roughly doubling the ask rate. And tour-to-lease conversion increased a little under 50%, kind of in accordance with that. You know, it's a pilot, and it's not their whole portfolio, but it was a really convincing result. So little things like that.
Objection handling: just knowing what the common objections are. The most common objection is "just looking around." Tell me where else you're looking. Suddenly, first of all, you get someone talking, but second of all, and we can talk about this side of things, you start getting really valuable data. What are your actual comps? Not what the market survey data companies are saying, but what are the people who are coming in to your property actually saying they're also looking at? That is super, super valuable for marketing, for asset management, for revenue management. And even if you can't turn that objection, which is the most common one, into an immediate yes, you can use it as a moment to get really valuable data that'll help your company and ultimately help you perform much better.
Mike Wolber: Let's thread on that one too. Sometimes we think about sales data as being good for salespeople, and we forget that sales intelligence can feed your marketing narrative, it can feed your pricing strategy, it can feed your product and your positioning, it can feed your long-term forecast as you think through business realities that the field team hears about that the rest of the company doesn't. Are you seeing any data points beyond those that you just shared where more of the senior audience is like, whoa, we really see value in Grotto, to ingest this into different aspects of their business?
Nick Deveau: Yeah. We have a huge amount of traction with asset management teams for this reason. And I think you can say it like this, right? I might go to an asset manager and say, what if you could ask every prospect one question on every tour? What would that be? I'll tell you, the most common answer is reasons for not leasing. I was actually asking everyone at Blueprint this question this week, and that was like 90% the number one answer. And with Grotto, we can coach people up on sales behaviors, but we can also drive a little bit of question asking around these questions for which the answers would materially help asset managers or other senior leaders improve property performance. And so suddenly, if that's the question you want every leasing consultant asking, we can do that. At the push of a button, we type in, make sure that you ask, "Hey, what's holding you back today?" And that's one of the criteria that the on-site teams are getting coached up against. Now every single agent is getting coached up on asking this question that's going to provide really, really valuable data back to senior leadership. And that version of Grotto, which is, at the push of a button, get the answer to any question across your entire portfolio, directly from your prospects, is really, really exciting to senior leaders.
Mike Wolber: That's awesome. And I'm curious, I mean, I've heard your answer, but for people listening, are you seeing very much resistance to the wearable AI tech to actually get this audio data? I think sometimes people are going to think no one's going to want to participate in this, we're going to get a ton of opt-outs. Wearable tech feeds your engine. What kind of data and utilization are you actually seeing from your daily active users?
Nick Deveau: Yeah, first thing: our North Star is just impact. Can we help our partners make more money, either through reduced vacancy loss or something else, like reduced new-hire ramp-up time? We always want to work backwards from impact. But again, this is not just an AI agent where you can reprompt something and change behavior. You have to drive behavior change. And to drive behavior change, you need engagement with the platform, which we measure as: how many tours are you recording? What percent of all tours are you recording? We have KPIs for that in our pilots, like by week one, this percent; by week six, this percent. And in the way that we drive that engagement, one, we're always iterating on the form factor for recording. We started with a phone with a little microphone, a Bluetooth, influencer-style mic, to get really crisp audio. We're now even on smartwatches, and surprisingly we have found smartwatches that have even better audio than the influencer-style mic, which is just incredible. It's because they're trying to also be phones, so they have these really phenomenal microphones. So it's just meeting teams where they're at. If they say they already have a company phone that they need to lug around and they don't want to carry another phone, great, let's try the watch. And so we'll drive engagement that way. And then we drive engagement just by taking work off their plates, right? Those are the easiest wins. Okay, we've recorded a tour: let's fill out the CRM, let's draft personalized follow-ups, let's do reporting for you. And that also drives engagement.
Mike Wolber: And what are the percentages? Do you see 95? What's the actual utilization rate?
Nick Deveau: So our aspirational target is, of course, 100%. If we're above 80%, that's good. And in terms of opt-out rates: with operators in two-party consent states, where you've got to disclose, hey, we're recording this, everyone asks, is that going to dissuade potential prospects? And we see less than 10% opt-out rates in those two-party consent states.
Mike Wolber: That's awesome. That's way better than I would have expected.
Nick Deveau: It's all about how you ask for consent these days. If you sound like the robot at the beginning of a phone call, like "this call will be recorded for quality," that's not going to win. But if you provide value to the prospect in the way that you ask for consent, like, "Hey, do you mind if I record this so I can give you a more personalized follow-up?", suddenly it gives them the value, and then the objection rate is, you know, less than 10%.
Mike Wolber: The way I train people on it is, when you're getting on a call, don't be weird. Let's acknowledge that Gong is on. "Hey, do you mind if we've got Gong listening, so I don't have to take notes and I can focus on you today?" And it's like, "Yeah, that sounds great."
Nick Deveau: Yeah. Exactly. That's exactly right.
Mike Wolber: So this is not weird. But as soon as you're weird about it, I see so many people go, "Yeah, let's turn it off today." So I think it's all about ownership.
Nick Deveau: No, totally. And I'll also say on this, I think a tailwind that helps us is that leasing agents, as I mentioned earlier, are a lot of them younger, and at this point they're pretty AI-native. And not even that they're AI geeks and they're using it, but they just kind of exist in a world where AI is. And so they're not too bothered by the idea of bringing this up with a prospect.
Mike Wolber: Yeah, it's spot on. Well, the last topic I want to hit on with you today, Nick, is just the proptech ecosystem. You're a couple of cycles now into learning proptech and multifamily, and you've certainly seen a lot of companies, and you're also learning about the dependencies, top of funnel and down funnel, that you have to win with integration and all of those things. I'd love to get your take on what you're seeing out there: any products, any categories, any aspects of the market that have you feeling excited from a technology perspective.
Nick Deveau: I mean, besides AI sales coaching and intelligence?
Mike Wolber: For sure.
Nick Deveau: So I think, broadly, the things that get me excited are really rich integration ecosystems. We're a kind of best-of-breed point solution, right? And I know that. And there's some pressure in the market from some partners to really consolidate their tech stack. And by the way, I think that's the result of tech not being obviously valuable. If something's really valuable, you don't want to bundle it away and get rid of it. But I think there's been a lot of discussion about much more open ecosystems. Even Funnel the other day, I think, planted their flag and said, we are going to be open, right? And that's awesome, because there are so many platforms that are not open. And I think the respectful thing to do for the partners who are paying us all a lot of money is to make our stuff work with each other, versus these turf wars. So I love the emphasis I've seen recently on open integrations. I love working with partners that openly integrate and walk the walk. Something we're excited about is other vendors and other partners in the space having data that we can find useful and bring in. You could imagine ILSs like you guys having really rich data on prospects. Of course you do, right?
Mike Wolber: For sure. We know renters really well.
Nick Deveau: How do you use that to drive a personalized experience on site, or in lead nurturing, or anything, right? I mean, think about how targeted and personalized your Instagram ads are. Maybe some people have issues with that, but I love my targeted ads. They know what I want, and they actually help me out, right? It's kind of a win-win for everyone. So how do you bring that level of precision to some of the down-funnel interactions? And I think this increasingly open ecosystem, where data's flowing everywhere, enables that.
Mike Wolber: For sure. I think the future is so bright for you to be able to ingest more, both for the teams that are using the tech, but also for the prospective resident to have an experience that is consistent throughout, not clunky with handoffs. "So what brought you in today?" I mean, it's the worst question ever when you've already had a call with an SDR, for the AE to ask, what are you interested in? And with what you can do to augment what they were interested in on the marketing side before they got to sales, it sounds like the future's super bright for you guys.
Nick Deveau: Yeah, and, you know, there's a line to toe. We have some other data. You asked about data earlier, and I've talked about these stats a lot now, so maybe listeners have heard these before, but what are some of the behaviors that really drive conversion? One of them is asking open-ended questions and doing proper discovery. So you don't want a world where you're warm-starting every conversation so much that you actually kill discovery, because being genuinely curious about someone, like, "Hey, what's your story? Why are you moving to town? Because of work? Tell me about the job," that is stuff that builds rapport, and we know that rapport drives conversion. So there is a line to toe here. But I think probably a world with a few more warm starts is a good one.
Mike Wolber: Yeah, I agree. Well, hey, before we wrap up, I want to ask: you did a live case study or some sort of presentation this week with Josh from Hillpointe. I'd love to hear the CliffsNotes on how that went and what you guys talked about before we wrap for the day.
Nick Deveau: Yeah, definitely. So Hillpointe, they're the fifth largest developer in the country. If you don't know them, they are a fascinating, really cool story to watch. Hyper, hyper vertically integrated. They grow their own palm trees. I think it's the coolest thing ever. We met Josh when he was at Weidner Apartment Homes, which, like I mentioned, was our first customer. When he came over to Hillpointe, he called me up and said, "Hey, you were talking about tours. Let's do tours." They were the first in the industry to record their tours, and they did it with Grotto. We've now been live on their full portfolio for a long time, almost a year, and we put out this case study this week. And I'm almost to a fault a data nerd. It's my background. I love data, I love machine learning. I come from healthcare, where you can't publish anything unless, you know, lives depend on it. And so, probably to our team's dismay, I'm such a militant about the rigor of these case studies. And so finally I was like, okay, we've got enough data, let's put it out in the world. And the results were just incredible. We drove a 27% increase in tour-to-lease conversion with the agents that are using Grotto there, and a 50% increase in tour-to-application conversion. We reduced their new-hire ramp-up time, and this is the incredible result, from 90 days to nine days on site, and from 30 days to three days in the contact center. So just an incredible result. That's the result of a lot of hard work on our side, of course, but they've also been tremendous partners to us, taking the leap of faith and saying, "Hey, we want to be the first to do this. We're going to see if it works." And through that partnership, we've been able to drive truly, truly incredible results.
Mike Wolber: Awesome. There's such power and specificity in being able to also challenge, like, are you measuring this? And what a great way for you guys to come in and be able to teach early, because getting people from untroubled and unaware to really open and making a change is hard. So I'm really excited for you guys.
Nick Deveau: Yeah, yeah. Appreciate it.
Mike Wolber: Awesome, Nick. Well, you guys are easy to find online, and I'm looking forward to seeing you on the circuit this fall. I just want to wish you guys wild success in this next chapter. Thanks a ton for joining me today.
Nick Deveau: Yeah, thanks so much for having me. We'll see you around. Bye.