Apartment List, an AI-powered rental platform, announced a partnership with Grotto AI, which provides AI-powered sales coaching and on-site visibility for apartment leasing teams. The integration gives leasing agents access to prospective renters’ preferences during calls and property tours and coaches them to use the information in real-time to recommend homes that fit, personalize conversations and, ultimately, convert more prospects to tenants.
Renters share their budget, move-in date, pets and must-have amenities during their Apartment List search. Grotto’s platform puts those preferences in front of leasing agents before they speak with a prospect. Grotto combines that potential renter information with property details and available inventory, then coaches leasing agents in real-time to use the information at the most relevant moments in their conversations with prospective renters.
“Finding the right home should get easier with every conversation. Too often, renters have to explain what they’re looking for over and over again,” said Mike Wolber, chief sales officer at Apartment List. “With Grotto, we’re bringing what renters have already told us directly to leasing teams, so they can spend less time starting from scratch and more time helping someone find the right home.”
For a renter seeking a two-bedroom apartment with in-unit laundry and room for a pet, an agent can come prepared to discuss units and features that meet those needs. Instead of repeating basic questions, the conversation can build on what the renter has already shared and move the entire process forward faster.
“Today, every step of the rental journey is a cold start. The initial inbound, the calls, the tours. Each one starts without context from the previous, and there’s no concept of a unified customer journey. There’s deeper personalization when buying a pair of pants on Instagram than there is in the process of finding a home. Apartment List has bar-none the deepest understanding of prospective renters, and Grotto has bar-none the best way of deploying that information in real-world interactions, so the partnership felt like a match made in heaven,” said Nick Deveau, co-founder and CEO at Grotto.
Early results show the impact. In a randomized A/B test across 311 communities at one of the largest U.S. apartment operators, Weidner Apartment Homes, when Grotto surfaced Apartment List’s renter insights and coached agents to use them, lead-to-tour conversion increased by 35%.
