Leasing Is a Hospitality Job. It's Time to Hire Like It.

Our CEO Nick Deveau recently joined Jacob Kosior on EliseAI’s In Good Company podcast (link here), and one exchange has stuck with us since. Nick and Jacob were discussing what actually wins a lease: warmth, curiosity, rapport. Then Jacob called out something every multifamily leader has heard at a conference:

“We’ve always talked about hiring people from hospitality. We’ve always talked about hiring people from retail.”

Talked about for a decade, but not completely mastered.

Meanwhile, the industry has spent that decade investing in automating the top of the funnel. Operators have deployed technology for answering leads, scheduling, and follow-ups, but have invested little in the human moment where leases are actually won: the tour. The tour isn’t just a step in the funnel. It’s the real first impression, the 30 to 45 minutes where a prospect decides whether they can picture themselves living there. Despite all the advances in technology, the tour experience has remained largely the same.

Look up the definition of hospitality and you see making others feel welcome, comfortable, and valued. That’s not adjacent to the leasing job. That is the leasing job. Leasing is selling someone the place they’ll come home to every day, and the people who’ve spent their careers making strangers feel at home are working in the restaurants, bars, and hotels of every town in America.

That’s why your next best leasing agent might be a bartender.

The challenging leasing hiring math.

Ask any regional manager what keeps them up at night, and staffing tends to be near the top of the list. The National Apartment Association consistently finds that leasing consultants are among the hardest roles in the industry to fill, alongside maintenance technicians. And once you fill the seat, keeping it filled is its own battle: property management turnover runs at roughly 33% per the NAA, well above the ~22% national average.

Yet look at the average leasing job posting: two-plus years of leasing experience required, proficiency in a specific property management system preferred. That’s fishing in a small pond, and competing with other operators.

What actually predicts a lease has little to do with industry experience.

At Grotto, we’ve analyzed millions of leasing interactions, looking for what separates top performers. The answer isn’t product knowledge or tighter scripts. It’s relational. The headline stat is laughter: agents who laugh with a prospect are 48% more likely to convert them. Close behind is genuine curiosity: agents who ask open-ended questions about the move, the job, the dog see a 35% lift in conversion. And the traditional “ask for the tour” close, the move every sales training in this industry preaches? A 14% lift. Scripts matter, but warmth and building rapport beats a perfect script.

On the podcast, Nick told Jacob about the article that got our team thinking harder about all this: Burger King is now using AI coaching for its drive-thru workers, listening above all for politeness in the guest experience. A burger is ten bucks. An apartment is a $20,000-to-$30,000-a-year decision, and it’s someone’s home. If politeness is worth coaching at a drive-thru, there’s value in coaching warmth on a tour.

Notice what laughter and curiosity have in common: neither is taught in a leasing certification. They’re hospitality traits, along with reading people, recovering gracefully from awkward moments, and making strangers comfortable fast. In leasing, those aren’t just soft skills. They’re measurable, and they’re the ones that convert.

The talent pool next door.

If leasing is hospitality plus sales, the talent pool isn’t only people with leasing experience. It’s everyone who does hospitality for a living. The U.S. leisure and hospitality sector employs about 17 million people, nearly 15 million in restaurants and 2.2 million in hotels alone. Three things make this pool remarkable for multifamily:

• It’s everywhere. Every submarket you operate in has bars, restaurants, and hotels.
• It’s reachable. Hospitality workers have the lowest median tenure of any sector: 2.3 years in leisure and hospitality, 1.9 in food service. These people are already switching jobs. The question is whether they switch to you.
• The skills transfer. Peer-reviewed research on cross-occupational skill transferability found hospitality workers’ core strengths are communication, listening, empathy, and flexibility. Those are almost exactly the traits our conversion data flags as what wins a lease.

The historical hiring challenge.

The problem is, leasing is a difficult role that requires specialized training. Leasing agents need to be able to be smart on fair housing rules, pricing and specials, the property management system, and more. Let alone know how to actually run a tour.

Getting an industry outsider fully productive has traditionally taken months. Industry discussions of leasing onboarding describe check-ins at 30, 60, and 90 days, and research on onboarding more broadly puts full productivity for a new hire at up to eight months. Those are months a short-staffed team doesn’t have. So it’s understandable that when the talent shortage bites, many operators respond by getting more selective about industry experience. The unintended cost: it shrinks the pond further, and it filters out trained relationship builders in the broader hospitality community.

The hiring opportunity that exists today.

Here’s the reframe that makes hospitality hiring work. Of the two halves of the leasing job, the EQ half (warmth, curiosity, rapport) is the hard one. You can’t teach it in two weeks, and maybe not in two years. The leasing half (SOPs, pricing, compliance, how to run a tour) is the teachable one. So hire for the part you can’t teach, and use technology to teach the part you can.

That second part is exactly what AI coaching changed. With Grotto, every call and every tour is recorded and scored, so a new hire’s ramp looks like an athlete’s: they run a tour, then review their own performance. A scorecard shows what they hit and what they can improve, from the opening to the close, and coaches the gap in their own voice, so the guidance never feels scripted. Any missed moments in pricing or amenity discussions are flagged automatically, and agents get support writing personalized follow-ups that address the piece they missed live. Also, the feedback is self-serve, new hires get a personal coach in their pocket instead of waiting for a manager to find time to shadow them. No embarrassment, no judgment, just reps.

Our customers are using this tool to hire and ramp people faster than ever before. At one customer with >10K units, the team’s contact center manager spent 16 years as a bartender and fine-dining server before ever touching multifamily. He went from an agent with no industry experience to running the team within a year. When we asked him about how Grotto has impacted his time moving from hospitality to multifamily, he said:

“[In hospitality] sometimes they come for the food, but sometimes they come for the experience.” In multifamily, he found that prospects had the same desire for a positive experience, and said “Grotto has made it easier, more efficient, and fun to build that rapport with the prospect.”

And it’s not only hospitality hires. Across our customers we keep meeting people who came from outside leasing and ramped in days, not quarters. One former healthcare worker we spoke to started with zero property management experience and was promoted to a manager within a few months days of her first day. She says she felt confident running tours on her own after a few days because she could review her scorecard and get immediate feedback each time. We met a college student on an internship who was touring solo within a week and closing confidently within a month, using her recordings to see exactly what she hit and missed on every tour. The pattern is the same every time: people skills walked in the door; Grotto taught the leasing.

The key is that neither half works alone. Great tech without warm humans gives you an efficient front desk with nobody eager to sign. Great people without coaching flounder for months on industry mechanics. Hire for the human part; let the technology teach the leasing part.

What this means for your next job posting.

If you’re ready to try hiring from hospitality, the changes are practical:

• Try it out. Post where hospitality people look, not just on industry boards.
• Screen for curiosity and rapport, not just PMS vocabulary. Ask candidates to tell you about a guest they turned around.
• Expect industry knowledge in weeks, not months, and hold your training stack accountable for that.

The home is the product. Hospitality is the sale.

One last thing, because it’s a core belief we hold at Grotto. Most AI pitches in this industry are about reduction: fewer hours, fewer headcount, lower cost per lead. We’re aiming for a different number. Humans aren’t the cost center in leasing; missed leases are. The bigger prize isn’t cutting the team that sells your product. It’s capturing the revenue that’s currently walking out the door after an unremarkable tour. The first wave of AI got more prospects to your doorstep. The next wave decides what happens when they walk through it. And that’s a human, selling.

A lease is most people’s single biggest expense of the year, and it’s the home they come back to every day. That sale deserves people who are great with people. Those people are already out there, taking care of guests in every town in America. The humans are the differentiator. The technology is the accelerant.

Hear the full conversation on EliseAI’s In Good Company here. And if you want to see how leasing teams ramp new hires in weeks, not months, book a demo here.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can you hire leasing agents with no industry experience?

Yes. The traits that predict leasing success (warmth, curiosity, rapport-building) come from service backgrounds like restaurants, bars, and hotels. With Grotto’s AI coaching handling the leasing-specific ramp (SOPs, pricing, touring), operators have seen hires with zero leasing background reach top-decile performance within two weeks.

What makes a good leasing agent?

Analysis of millions of leasing interactions shows the strongest predictors of conversion are relational. Agents who laugh with prospects are 48% more likely to convert them, and genuine curiosity drives a 35% lift, more than double the traditional “ask for the tour” tactic. Product knowledge matters, but that’s a part of the job that you can teach quickly with AI coaching tools.

How long does it take to train a leasing agent with AI coaching?

Far less than traditional shadowing. With recorded tours, self-serve scorecards, and instant product-knowledge lookup, operators have seen new hires touring solo within a week, confident within a few weeks, and in some cases promoted to management roles within months.

Why hire from hospitality for multifamily leasing?

The U.S. hospitality workforce is roughly 17 million strong, present in every market, and has the lowest median job tenure of any sector, meaning candidates are reachable. Research shows their core transferable skills (communication, listening, empathy, flexibility) map directly to what wins leases.