Grotto named Overall Real Estate Closing Innovation of the Year
PropTech Breakthrough named Grotto the 2026 Overall Real Estate Closing Innovation of the Year.
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, we’re 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, we 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.
