Making Everyone a Top Performer

Hillpointe, an NMHC top-10 developer, has an ambitious mission. They aim to provide a consistent, top-tier brand experience across their portfolio, while delivering 10,000+ units of attainable housing per year.

To get there, Hillpointe rolled out GrottoAI’s Real-time Call Guidance and AI Tour Coaching across their portfolio, building a leasing operation that ramps new agents in days, converts more tours, and drives NOI.

America’s most trusted brands all share one quality. A Starbucks coffee tastes the same in Tampa as it does in Boise. The check-in at a Hilton in Atlanta is identical to the one in Phoenix. Pull into any Chick-fil-A drive-thru and you’ll hear “my pleasure” instead of “you’re welcome” whether you’re in rural Georgia or NYC. America’s most trusted brands are defined by the consistency of the experience they provide.

Multifamily leasing has never had that. Even within a single company and asset class, a renter’s experience comes down to which property they walk into, which agent is on shift, and the kind of week that agent is having. It’s a coin flip.

Hillpointe, a vertically-integrated developer delivering 10,000+ units per year across the Southeast, saw that things could be different.

For Josh Draughn, Hillpointe’s SVP of Marketing and Centralized Operations, the goal was not just to run leasing better. It was to make Hillpointe a household name, and a brand renters would trust on sight. His vision was to improve leasing by bringing Starbucks-like consistency to the industry.

Consistency in multifamily comes down to people. The prospect experience is only as good as the agent delivering it, so a consistent brand requires an excellent team at every property, and that’s difficult to staff in a growing portfolio.

Leasing agent turnover runs north of 30% annually (NAA), and staffing / recruitment has topped operating challenge lists for years (NAA Survey Results). Typically, operators are competing over a shrinking pool of experienced agents, and ramping new-hires takes months.

To meet its operating goals, Hillpointe had to overcome three key obstacles that the industry had never solved:

1. A multifamily talent shortage. Many Hillpointe locations are in rural areas with few experienced leasing agents. Hillpointe was not going to solve consistency by finding more tenured leasing veterans.
2. New-hire ramp times. Historically, it took up to three months to train an on-site hire from outside the industry. That’s a structural barrier for a developer delivering 10,000+ units a year.
3. A blind spot in the leasing funnel. The tour is where the prospect experience is won or lost, but historically, it’s been a black box for managers. Short of being there live or paying for a secret shop, they were flying blind.

Hillpointe knew what excellent leasing excellence looked like from years of studying top performers. What they needed was a way to instill it in every new hire on day one, and to scale it across the entire portfolio.

Hillpointe wanted a partner that could turn natural relationship-builders into effective agents within days, against a clear, repeatable definition of great leasing.

Grotto was purpose-built for multifamily and integrated with the systems Hillpointe already ran, so they were able to hit the ground running.

Hillpointe deployed Grotto solutions in their centralized contact center, and on-site across their growing property portfolio:

Real-time Call Guidance: Turn-by-turn navigation for every leasing call. Grotto sits on the agent’s screen, prompting the best questions to ask, surfacing answers instantly, and walking agents through objections as they arise.

AI Tour Coaching:A personal coach for every agent. Grotto scores each interaction against Hillpointe’s playbook and delivers immediate, personalized feedback.

Grotto Assist:Calls are recorded through Hillpointe’s existing telephony stack and tours are captured through Grotto’s mic hardware. Both land in Hillpointe’s PMS and CRM, and are used to auto-populate guest cards, personalize follow-ups and generate automated reporting.

Hillpointe’s bet paid off. With Grotto, Hillpointe created a system that produces consistent, high-quality tours, and those tours drive higher conversion, while increasing speed to close. That represented recovered rent that dropped directly to the bottom line.

Hillpointe set out to give attainable-housing renters a brand they could trust to deliver the same high-quality experience every time. With Grotto, consistency is no longer the thing multifamily can’t deliver. At Hillpointe, it’s a competitive edge.