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

Nick Deveau is on a mission to fix billions of dollars being lost through apartments sitting vacant each year. As Co-Founder and CEO of GrottoAI, he's built a coaching tool that works alongside multifamily leasing teams on their calls and onsite tours, a first for the industry, to find insights into what moves a prospect to lease.Nick has spent nearly a decade building vertical AI in highly regulated industries, from hiring to healthcare to insurance. Most recently, he and Co-founder Ben Epstein led the core technology behind EvolutionIQ's $730 million acquisition in late 2024, one of the first major vertical AI exits. He has graduate training from Stanford, and a long-running fascination with behavior change that traces back to his early days in psychiatry research.Jacob Kosior and Nick get into the half-trillion-dollar vacancy problem hiding behind every empty unit, the human signals that predict whether a prospect moves forward, why the tour is the richest and most overlooked data source in leasing, how operators are hiring for rapport over resumes, and why leasing is sales. Plus Greta, the in-house AI employee that built Grotto's paid-search engine over a weekend.Timestamps:01:31 - This or That 02:50 - The psychiatry-to-AI thread04:41 - Leaving a $730M exit for apartment leasing 05:34 - The half-trillion-dollar vacancy problem 06:43 - What the data says converts a prospect 09:04 - The tour: leasing's richest data source 10:36 - Hiring for rapport, and why a bartender works 13:16 - Leasing is sales 14:58 - What vertical AI sees that horizontal tools miss 16:11 - Greta, Grotto's in-house AI employeeNew episodes twice a month. Follow the show so you never miss one. In Good Company is a multifamily podcast by EliseAI. 🔗 Learn more: https://meet.eliseai.com/4nSeP7b