Why the Best Leaders Still Pick Up the Trash

• Tony Sousa started as an actor in LA — he stumbled into leasing apartments for $75 a commission to save money on rent, and rose through every position in multifamily from leasing consultant to VP of Operations at RPM. He credits the actor's skill of reading body language for much of that climb.

• The top performers in every industry share one trait: a commitment to doing the unseen things right, consistently, whether someone is watching or not. The property manager who bends over and picks up trash on the way to the leasing office is the same person whose reporting is clean and whose teams are tight.

• The ivory tower is not just a metaphor. There is a real and largely unacknowledged class divide in multifamily between the financial degree side and the blue-collar operator side. Great leaders bridge it by getting into the field — not to point out what is wrong, but to shake hands, listen, and come back with three things they are proud of.

• Mystery shopping has been the industry's primary visibility tool for 15 years and it has never really worked. The rep knows who the shopper is, performs for them, and the coaching conversation that follows is built on a he-said-she-said foundation that dissolves under any pushback.

• In 2026, human intangibles — judgment, point of view, lived experience — are becoming scarce. Anything scarce becomes valuable. AI can answer any question instantly. It cannot hold a real opinion, read the room, or earn someone's trust.

Tony Sousa studied TV journalism in college and wanted to be a journalist. In Los Angeles, with decent hair and enough charisma, he got talked into acting. He spent years auditioning, working seven different odd jobs — caterer, limo driver, substitute teacher — and sharing a room to save money.

He needed cheaper rent. He looked at what a leasing consultant did and decided he could do it. He was right. The first commission was $75 per lease.

Every six to eight months after that, he was offered a promotion. He took all of them. He worked through every position in the industry — leasing, assistant manager, property manager, regional manager — all the way to VP of Operations at RPM, one of the largest property management companies in the country. He describes the trajectory as the opposite of anything he planned.

What the actor background gave him was not just comfort on camera. It gave him a skill set he could not name until much later: the ability to walk into any room, read what the people in it were feeling before they said anything, adjust in real time, and keep going.

In multifamily, the conversation between a leasing consultant and a prospective resident is rarely about the apartment. It is about whether the prospect trusts the person standing in front of them.

Tony points to the number that has not changed since his leasing days: 80 to 90 percent of communication is tone and body language, not words. The rep who is talking the most is usually the one listening the least. The prospect whose arms are crossed is not convinced — and no amount of continued talking is going to change that. The prospect who is leaning forward, nodding, engaged — that is the rep's signal to run with what they have.

He uses this framework with his consulting clients now, and he takes it one step further. Reading the room in 2026 also means reading digital rooms. LinkedIn is a different conversation than TikTok. Instagram is different from Facebook. Each platform has its own norms, its own emotional temperature, its own unwritten rules about what lands and what doesn't.

The actor background made this natural. In an audition room, the casting directors stone-face you — that is their job. In the real world, people are not trying to hide what they feel. If you know what to look for, they tell you everything before they open their mouth.

Sebastian asks Tony what separates the top performers in multifamily from everyone else. Tony's answer is not a system or a technology. It is a commitment to doing the unseen things right.

He calls himself a professional storm chaser for most of his operator career — the person sent into troubled assets to turn them around. The pattern he found in every failing property was the same: not catastrophic failure, but corners cut. Reports that smoothed over the numbers. Work orders closed without follow-up. Trash walked past on the way to the leasing office.

His standard became simple: do the right thing whether someone is watching or not, because someone is always watching. A resident might be looking out their window right now at whether the property manager bent over and picked up the piece of trash in the parking lot. That detail says everything about what is happening in the reporting, in the leasing office, in the renewal conversations.

He is also honest about his own early career. He had the charisma and the articulation skills from the start, and he used them to cover gaps in his expertise. Bosses noticed. They told him directly: you cannot smoke and mirror your way into rooms forever. At some point the knowledge and execution have to be there too. He describes digging into the operations and data around year 10 of his career as one of the defining decisions he made.

The lesson he draws for operators: charisma and charm are great starting points. They are not enough without the work behind them.

Tony raises a problem that most in multifamily know but few name out loud: the class divide between the financial side of the business and the operator side.

The financial analyst has a college degree, an Excel fluency, and a career track that runs through quarterly reporting and asset calls. The leasing consultant has a different background entirely — closer to the blue-collar trades than to the investment management world. In most portfolios, these two groups meet exactly once on the org chart: the asset manager and the VP of Operations on a quarterly call.

The disconnect is not incidental. It shapes how feedback is given, how culture is built, how problems get surfaced. An executive who has spent a decade in an air-conditioned office and never walked a property in a hot Texas summer does not understand what she is asking for when she sets operational targets. She also does not understand why her culture statements are not landing with the team on the ground.

Tony's prescription is not complicated. Get out of the office. Visit the properties. Do it not to inspect — do it to be present. Your team does not need your critique once a year. They need to see your face.

There is a specific kind of site visit that does more damage than not visiting at all. Tony calls it seaguling.

The seagull leader shows up once every ten years, walks the property, and immediately begins pointing out everything wrong. The team has spent the previous week prepping for the visit. The executive arrives, takes fifteen minutes to find the mulch that is not right and the report that should have been formatted differently, then leaves. The team watches the car pull away and their morale leaves with it.

The right visit looks different. It starts with handshakes. It includes a few minutes sitting with the leasing staff — not inspecting their work but listening to their stories, understanding what the month has been like, pouring a glass of water out of the office Alhambra. It ends not with a list of problems but with a list of things the executive is going to take back to corporate because the team is doing them well and everyone else should learn.

Tony describes this as the mascot function of leadership — a role that feels beneath the title but is one of the most powerful things a senior leader can do. His teams told him years after the fact how much those visits meant. Not the feedback. The presence.

He makes the same argument Sebastian makes about Rilla: the technology does not replace the physical visit. It fills the gap between visits so that a manager is never fully blind to what is happening on the floor. But no recording substitutes for the VP who came out, shook someone's hand, and said in front of the whole team: this is what excellent looks like.

There is a difference between feedback from someone who has been with you, seen what you have built, and understands your market — and feedback from a stranger who just decided to give you a performance review.

Tony has seen the second scenario enough times to have strong feelings about it. He was once at a conference when someone approached a person he did not know and asked, can I give you some feedback? His internal response was immediate: No. You haven't earned the right.

The cultural shift that matters here is not generational softness — Tony is explicit about that. It is that in 2026, people have options. If feedback comes from someone who has not built trust, who has not shown up, who does not understand what the person in front of them is actually doing — they leave. They go online. They tell someone. The executive who thinks they can show up once a year and lead through critique is operating on an assumption about how the world works that stopped being true some years ago.

The solution is not to stop giving feedback. It is to earn the right first. Be present enough that when the correction comes, it lands in the context of someone who knows you, believes in you, and is making the observation because they want you to grow — not because they showed up and needed to demonstrate authority.

Mystery shopping has been the primary visibility tool in multifamily for as long as Tony has been in the industry. It has also never really worked.

The mechanics are simple and flawed. A shopper arrives at the property, poses as a prospect, and tours the community. They then go home and reconstruct the conversation from notes or memory. The report that results is a summary of what the shopper remembered, filtered through their subjective impression, written down hours later.

There are two structural problems with this. First, leasing consultants can identify shoppers. Tony says they have a primal instinct for it. He was one of them — he would sniff out the monthly shopper and hit every step of service to a perfect score, then return to business as usual the next day. The shop is not measuring the actual sales conversation. It is measuring a performance of it.

Second, the coaching conversation the report generates is built on sand. When the manager sits down with the rep and says the shopper noted you didn't ask about move-in timeline, the rep says the shopper is wrong. And the manager — unless they were standing in the room — has no counter. Tony describes his own early experience conceding to his reps whenever they pushed back hard enough, because the report gave him nothing solid enough to stand on.

Real coaching cannot happen on a he-said-she-said foundation. You cannot help someone get better when neither party is sure what actually happened.

The shift Tony describes when the conversation turns to Rilla is a shift from subjective to auditable. What actually happened in that tour? What did the rep say when the prospect mentioned her budget? Where did the conversation stall?

When a manager can point to a specific moment in a recorded conversation, the coaching dynamic changes. There is no debate about what happened. The question becomes: what should we do differently next time? That is a productive conversation. That is a conversation both sides are invested in having.

Tony also raises a second layer: coaching with real information requires coaches who know how to use it. Having the recording is not enough. The trap is playing a game of gotcha — waiting for the rep to deny something and then surfacing the recording as evidence. That is a terrible use of the technology and a worse coaching approach. The better use is sitting with the rep and listening together, the same way Tony's teams used to do with phone recordings. What do you think went well? Where do you wish you had taken it somewhere else?

The goal, as Tony frames it, is improving close rates, which improves occupancy, which improves retention, which improves the financial output that asset managers and investors are ultimately measuring. The chain is clear. It starts with a manager who can give a specific, accurate, productive coaching conversation. That conversation is impossible without visibility into what actually happened.

Multifamily was already living with AI before most industries started having the conversation. Companies like Elise AI changed how phone calls get handled. Self-guided tours removed the human from large portions of the leasing funnel. Tony has spoken about this at national conferences and watches the same anxiety register in every audience: am I going to lose my job?

His answer is honest rather than reassuring. In certain markets, the human interaction in leasing is already gone. In high-density coastal markets with younger residents, the expectation is full automation. That is not going to reverse.

But something else is happening at the same time. Information has become abundant. Any question a rep used to hold in their head as valuable institutional knowledge can now be answered in three seconds. That is no longer a differentiator. What becomes scarce — and therefore valuable — is judgment. Opinion. Experience. The ability to read what is actually happening in a situation and make a call that an algorithm cannot make.

Tony's message to anyone in frontline sales worried about automation: lean into what cannot be automated. Your creative thinking, your relationship skills, your hard-earned experience. And raise the standard. Good service is not going to be enough anymore. The bar is excellent or automated — there is less and less space in between.

Tony closes the conversation without a formal list, but the session surfaces five things any sales leader can apply immediately.

Get in the field before you have an opinion. You cannot give feedback you have not earned. Earning it requires presence — not inspecting, just being there. Before you tell your team what is wrong, spend enough time with them to understand what they are up against.

When you visit, be a mascot, not an auditor. Come back from every site visit with three things you are proud of. Your critical list will write itself. The encouragement is harder to find, but it is the thing that moves people.

Replace mystery shoppers with recorded truth. If your coaching conversations are still based on mystery shopper reports, your coaching is built on a foundation that dissolves the moment a rep pushes back. You need the real conversation.

Coach from curiosity, not from gotcha. Having the recording is not the point. Sitting with the rep and asking what they notice — that is the point. Coaching from shared investigation is the only coaching that sticks.

Double down on what AI cannot do. For your team and for yourself: identify the skills in your work that require human judgment, lived experience, and real relationship. That is where the investment goes now. Everything that can be automated will be.

Tony Sousa is the founder of Sousa Consulting Group and one of the most recognized voices in the multifamily industry. He spent over two decades as an operator — from leasing consultant at Avalon Bay to Vice President of Operations at RPM Living — and has held roles across leasing, property management, regional management, marketing, and training. He is an active content creator with a growing audience on LinkedIn and other platforms, and speaks frequently at national multifamily conferences on leadership, operations, and the future of human work in an automated industry.

Sebastian Jimenez is the co-founder and CEO of Rilla. Rilla Labs is the company's podcast, where Jimenez speaks with sales leaders, operators, and coaches from across industries.

Rilla is the conversation analytics platform for in-person sales and service teams. The platform has analyzed over 100 million minutes of recorded customer conversation across 200+ companies. Rilla turns recorded sales conversations into structured coaching insight, scorecards, and rep development loops. Teams using Rilla typically see a 25% lift in close rate within 90 days. Learn more at rilla.com.