AI for Founders with Ryan Estes · 2026-06-17 · 54 min
There is thirty billion dollars a year in lost rent sitting in empty units across America, and that vacancy quietly erases roughly half a trillion dollars of property value. Everyone assumed the fix was price, amenities, or a slicker chatbot. Then Nick Deveau and his co-founder Ben Epstein got their hands on millions of real leasing calls from one of the largest apartment owners in the country, pointed a team of machine learning engineers at the data, and found something nobody scripted for. The single strongest predictor of a signed lease was not the special, not the square footage, not a scarcity tactic. It was whether the leasing agent laughed on the phone. The second strongest was whether they asked a genuinely curious question. So Grotto AI did the counterintuitive thing. While most of the industry raced to replace humans with voice agents, Grotto built a tool to make humans better at the one thing only humans can do: build rapport. A leasing agent gets a push notification fifteen minutes before a tour telling them the prospect has a dog named Fido, loves natural light, and drives a Subaru.
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