Grotto AI on leasing as sales, asking twice and 9-day ramp-ups

It's cool.

So, I mean, at this point, September 2026, you are waking up, 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.

Yeah.

Cool.

The thing I wanna dig into next here is kind of this, like, 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 wanna 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 kind of showing up with customer engagement to help them rethink how they can spend their time, money, and resource?

Yeah, I mean, it, it... like, we, we've talked about this before.

I think, um, if y- if you think about a software company or, or lots of types of company, any company that sells something, [chuckles] you know, like many of them, if they're not hitting their targets, they s- they, they look at demand, they look at pipeline, for sure, but they also look at how are they converting their pipeline? What are they doing? How are, how are they handling these processes? And I think that...

I mean, if I think about our pipeline at, at Grotto, when, when we're behind, which, you know, I hope we're not usually, but, uh, when... [chuckles] 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, like, there weren't the tools or the processes to really invest in the, like, the human nurturing of a lead, and that resulted in just sort of like a, kind of like an emphasis on the tech and the solutions that could increase top of funnel because down funnel was treated more as kind of like this fixed thing, right? It just, it existed.

It was a machine that existed.

You know, it was an engine that ran on, like, 70%, but we don't really know how to make it run 100%.

Yeah, I don't think people were actively saying, "Let's not focus on it." I just don't think that there were tools that really enabled people to get good ROI out of their time when they focused on it.

I almost think of this like blind spots, right? Like you have certain things you can't see or you're not aware of, and if you're not seeing them, well, you're not even thinking about it.

But a tool like Grotto can come in and show you that, "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 gonna be an opportunity for the industry to really open up their eyes to, like, how much room there is within their control to really improve, you know, conversion, propensity to not just showing up for the tour, but making that desirable next step.

And in several mutual meetings we had this week at Blueprint, I think we also got a lot of resonance to this that we know marketing, but we do not know sales.

Yeah.

Like, help us close the gap.

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 something that was as prevalent as it is today.