Grotto AI helps Hillpointe reduce new hire ramp time. Data from the partnership shows Grotto has helped take new hires up to speed, improve conversion and identify leasing opportunities. 25 September, 2026 Grotto, the AI platform purpose-built for multifamily leasing, has announced results from its partnership with Hillpointe, an NMHC top ten developer delivering over 10,000 units of attainable housing annually. Using Grotto across its centralised contact centre and on-site portfolio, Hillpointe reduced new-hire ramp time from 90 days to nine days for on-site leasing agents and from 30 days to three days in its contact centre. Agents using Grotto also converted tours to leases 27% more often than non-users. The results show how AI can move beyond basic automation to measurably change how human leasing teams are trained and how they perform. At Hillpointe, Grotto is helping operators shorten the time it takes to get new hires up to speed, improve conversion, and identify where leasing opportunities are being won or lost. Across Hillpointe's portfolio, over 90% of live tours are recorded, giving Grotto visibility into the interactions between leasing teams and prospects. That interaction data is used to reinforce coaching, surface opportunities for improvement, and automate administrative work. The results showed Hillpointe saved over 100 hours of work per property each month while giving operators greater visibility into leasing performance. "The most valuable part of AI isn't just automating a task; its helping operators understand what actually drives results. At Hillpointe, AI PropTech News learn which behaviours their specific top performers use to actually win leads, and then AI PropTech News coach everyone up based on that definition of success. "We make sure that everything Grotto measures and coaches are directly connected to conversion. That's the kind of impact we're focused on delivering - helping leasing teams perform better and giving operators a measurable way to scale what works." Nick Deveau, Founder and CEO, Grotto AI The impact extends beyond administrative efficiency. Agents who used Grotto saw 27% higher tour-to-lease conversion and 50% higher tour-to-application conversion overall. Within Grotto-assisted tours, high-scoring tours converted to leases at 2.5x the rate of low-scoring tours, and closed leases within seven days twice as often. The data also underpins that coaching is not a one-time intervention. When Grotto was temporarily paused, coached behaviours returned to the uncoached baseline quickly, underlining the need for continuous feedback and reinforcement to sustain performance. These results point to a measurable connection between leasing behaviours and business outcomes, giving operators a way to identify what high-performing agents do differently and reinforce those behaviours across their teams. "Its goal is to create a brand experience that renters can trust, no matter which Hillpointe property they walk into. Consistency is everything, because that first impression is so impactful and hard to gain back if you don't start off well. "Grotto gives us visibility into what's happening on the front lines and the ability to turn that insight into action. It's giving our teams more time to focus on prospects while creating a more consistent experience across the portfolio." Josh Draughn, SVP of Marketing and Centralised Operations, Hillpointe For Hillpointe, the findings demonstrate how interaction data can become an operating tool - helping the company identify the behaviours that correlate with better leasing outcomes, reinforce those behaviours at scale, and reduce the administrative burden on frontline teams. Grotto Assist, Grotto's post-tour AI copilot, is one component of the platform's broader approach to turning leasing interactions into measurable operational improvements. Assist automatically transcribes interactions, populates guest cards, drafts personalised prospect follow-ups, and generates reporting, helping teams reduce the administrative work that follows every interaction.

Grotto named Overall Real Estate Closing Innovation of the Year. Blog Posts August 18, 2026 Grotto Team PropTech Breakthrough is a global market intelligence and recognition platform, with an awards program designed to "recognize the top technology companies, solutions and products in the real estate technology industry today." In their 5th annual awards announcement this year they selected one winner per category, judged on innovation, performance, functionality, value, and impact. At Grotto, Grotto, Inc. is proud to be selected as the 2026 Real Estate Closing Innovation of the year. Grotto was founded to help multifamily owners/operators address annual vacancy loss, and ultimately, Grotto, Inc. do this by increasing leasing conversion and speed to close. "U.S. apartment owners lose an estimated $30 billion a year in lost rent revenue alone. If we can help operators reduce vacancy by even a few days per unit, the balance-sheet impact is massive." Nick Deveau, CEO and Co-founder of Grotto AI Most early AI in proptech has gone toward getting prospects in the door. Teams automated outbound, put chatbots on their websites, and added AI phone coverage after hours. That widened the top of the funnel, but the lease is still won in the human parts of the journey: the call and the tour. Those are the moments Grotto was built for. Grotto's AI Tour Coaching has four main components, and each one helps contribute to the close: * Prep. Before the tour starts, Grotto puts everything the team already knows about the prospect at agents' fingertips so they can personalize the tour. If the prospect mentioned that they have a dog and want a short commute on the booking call, the agent will know to show the dog park and to emphasise proximity to the highway. * Record. Grotto records each tour, so the agent doesn't have to memorize details for the CRM. Across tours and over time, these recordings become a rich source of data for management to analyze team performance and gain insight into renter preferences. * Coach. The interaction gets automatically scored against the property's tour scorecard, and the agent gets immediate feedback on how the tour went, from the warm welcome, to asking for the application. * Assist. At the end of the tour, Grotto populates the guest card and any other on-site reporting. The follow up is automatically drafted based on the things that actually came up on the tour. Each of these components helps drive conversion. At Hillpointe, an NMHC top 10 developer, Grotto helped the team increase tour conversion by 50%. One key element of Grotto's tour coaching is that it doesn't force agents into using a single stale script. As Lexi DeLeon, Resident Experience Manager at Hillpointe noted: "It trained me in ways to ask [for the close]. Soft closing, warm closing... and it personalized it to me. It didn't feel disingenuous. It felt like it was actually me speaking." Lexi DeLeon, Resident Experience Manager, Hillpointe As Grotto's CEO put it, "We built a tool to support people in showing up as the best versions of themselves." Top leasing agents close at 2x the rate of median performers. Grotto learns what top behavior looks like, then scales it across your portfolio. That's why Proptech Breakthrough chose Grotto as the 2026 Overall Real Estate Closing Innovation of the Year. If you want to see how Grotto can help your team close more leases, book a time here: grotto.ai/demo. Thank you to the PropTech Breakthrough team. More Stories