Tech Freed Up Leasing Agents. We Forgot to Tell Them What to Do Next.

Nick Deveau is co-founder and CEO of Grotto AI.

Amanda Maclin is Senior Managing Director of Strategic Services at Cushman & Wakefield.

A few weeks ago at AIM, Amanda Maclin said something from the stage that stopped the room: leasing agents are starting to look more like receptionists today than salespeople.

She argued that the industry is deploying so much tech that does the leasing agent's job for them that "nobody is eager to get up and close the leases."

The room got quiet, because everyone knew she was right.

The two of us come at this from different angles — Amanda from 25+ years of multifamily operations and marketing leadership, now at one of the country's largest management companies, Nick from a decade of building enterprise AI. But we've landed in the same place: the industry has adopted tech that drives efficiency, but nobody has told teams what to do with the time they've gotten back. And until they do, it's going to cost operators tens of millions in lost revenue.

How tech has hollowed out the role

Amanda again, from the AIM stage, told a story about her own early career:

"When I saw a car pull into the community, I was at the door ready to greet them because I needed that commission. I was a single mom. I couldn't wait to do a tour. I couldn't wait to follow up."

That energy is the engine of leasing. It's also, increasingly, missing, but it's not the agents' fault.

Look at what we've automated over the past five years. Inbound leads are now handled by AI. Lead nurturing? AI. Follow-ups, tour scheduling, reputation responses, email drafts? Again, all handled by AI. Even some operators have nearly fully replaced the tour — the single biggest opportunity to build a relationship with a prospect — by fully self-guided ones.

Each tool, on its own, is defensible. And they all came to be because of very real operational pain points. But together, they've engineered the humanity out of a role that is responsible for selling people their largest annual expense, and even more importantly, their home. When automation handles the lead, qualifies it, nurtures it, schedules it, and sometimes even tours it, the entire process becomes commoditized.

Maybe this worked when the market was hot and units leased themselves. But we're not in that type of market anymore. Apartment homes don't lease themselves, and so when a prospect is touring 2–3 of their final choices and they're comparing apples-to-apples, what's going to set your property apart from your competitors? The experience that prospect has when they walk through your doors for the first time.

It also makes you think: most of the modern-day automation and AI software was designed and built during a period when demand was high and less effort was required to lease. The workflows that this tech was built around (answering questions from prospects, giving pricing information, inviting to tours, and follow-up) look fundamentally different than what today's market demands, which is differentiating your property by building a relationship and trust with a prospect and persuading them to live with you. In other words, selling.

The question nobody's answering

Here's the thing every vendor-partner at every conference will tell you: their tool will save your team time. Their tool gives your team time back for the moments that matter most.

But here's what almost none of them will tell you: what your team should do with that time. We're creating efficiency without redirecting effort. We keep freeing up more and more time, but we're not designating what needs to be done with it.

That's a gap today, but it's also an enormous opportunity for operators who do figure out how to turn the hours that used to be spent on answering simple questions, follow-ups, and admin into hours that create connections and convince prospects to live with us.

While some of this might be a tech problem, the result of current-day solutions being designed in a previous era where simply answering questions and inviting people to tours moved the needle, it's ultimately a challenge to our industry's leadership. And it's one the industry has to confront if we want technology to continue driving revenue instead of draining it.

What the data says agents should actually be doing

To answer the "what now" question, we did the work.

At Grotto, our team of statisticians and AI researchers analyzed millions of leasing interactions, looking for what separates top performers from everyone else. We expected to find more efficient interactions, tighter scripts, better product knowledge. Things AI is great at, by the way.

We didn't.

The single biggest predictor of conversion was laughter. Agents who initiated laughter were 48% more likely to convert a lead. Agents who showed genuine curiosity were 35% more likely. By comparison, asking for the tour—the move every leasing training process in this industry preaches—drove just a 14% lift.

Read that again: the things AI is best at aren't the things that drive leases. The things AI is worst at—relationship building, rapport building—are.

This isn't a surprise to anyone who's spent real time on a leasing office floor. It's a surprise to a lot of the people writing checks for tech, though.

What good looks like

So what should leasing agents actually be doing with the time tech is freeing up? The answer is unglamorous:

• Be at the door when the car pulls in. The first 30 seconds of a tour shape the rest of it.
• Personalize. Remember the dog. Remember their daughter’s softball game. Remember the things that only a human can.
• Get curious. The data is unambiguous: curious agents convert more.
• Build the relationship: Make people laugh. By the time someone tours your property, whether someone leases with you will largely be determined by their experience on site. You have 30 minutes to make that prospect feel like a superstar.
• Follow up like it matters. 50% of leases close on the fifth touch or later. Most agents stop at two or three.

None of this is new. It's what great leasing teams have always done. The difference now is that tech can actually free them up to do it, if we point them toward it.

The McDonald's lesson

To make the point concrete: Amanda told the AIM audience a story of when she recently walked into a "humanless" McDonald's. No staff at the counter, just touchscreens. She watched a family of four take 13 minutes to order. Then a bus of seniors pulled up — walkers, wheelchairs, one blind man with a cane. She ended up taking 22 orders herself, Apple Paying for elderly strangers who only had cash on them.

An hour and a half for an ice cream cone.

"AI, all of these things are supposed to be efficient," she told the AIM audience. "But is it really efficient if you take 100% of the human element out of it?"

Multifamily isn't McDonald's. The stakes are higher. Rent is the largest expense most people have. As one operator put it to us: leasing an apartment is the most intimate decision you'll make all year because you're going to connect with that home.

The operators who will win won’t turn that process entirely over to a touchscreen.

The path forward

The operators who win the next five years will be the ones who don’t just employ technology, but, even more importantly, ensure their teams make use of that recovered time by being exceptional at the things only people can do.

That means being intentional. Before you sign the next vendor contract, ask: what does this free up my team to do? And then train them up on what they should be doing with that time. Building relationships with prospects, building rapport, making connections, persuading people to live in your community.

Otherwise you've just bought yourself a more expensive way to turn salespeople into receptionists.

2025 was the year the industry learned AI could automate almost anything. 2026 needs to be the year we figure out what it shouldn't.