If AI Can Handle Leasing Tasks, What Happens to Leasing Teams with Jacob Kosior, Ep. 805
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Written by John Casmon

August 20, 2026

Jacob Kosior has over ten years of experience in the multifamily housing industry, spanning operations, marketing, and centralization efforts across conventional, student housing, affordable housing, and build-to-rent communities. He previously served as Vice President of Centralized Services at Cardinal Group Management and has held leadership positions with BH Management, The Dinerstein Companies, and CA Ventures.

In 2022, while founding a centralized services team at Cardinal Group, Jacob began testing AI tools across the housing space and co-developed a delinquency AI product for rent collection with the EliseAI team. Today he is at EliseAI, where he works with operators of all sizes to implement AI tools, manage the change required for the technology to stick, and rethink how work gets structured across a portfolio.

In this episode, Jacob Kosior breaks down how multifamily operators are actually deploying AI, where to start, and what agentic AI changes about the way workflows get built. Drawing on a decade in operations before moving to the technology side, Jacob explains why leasing is the natural entry point, why speed is becoming the metric that matters more than conversion rate alone, and why owners who call their own properties tend to misjudge voice AI. He and John also work through the harder question operators face once automation is in place: what the human team should be doing instead.

Make sure to download our free guide, 7 Questions Every Passive Investor Should Ask, here.

Key Takeaways

  • Start with leasing, where the tasks are repetitive and already documented
  • Build AI workflows on the same follow-up cadence you train your onsite teams on
  • Track speed alongside conversion rates, because faster cycles compound
  • Decide where human touchpoints serve the customer, not just the org chart
  • Redeploy the hours AI frees up into experience or revenue generating work
  • Ask questions early, since lacking internal AI talent is the most common barrier

Topics

From Operations to the Technology Side

  • Jacob spent over a decade in multifamily operations before moving into AI
  • Founding a centralized services team at Cardinal Group in 2022 pushed him to demo every tool available
  • He co-developed a delinquency AI tool and a centralized call center product with EliseAI before joining the company

What Agentic AI Actually Changes

  • Generative AI answers prompts; agentic AI follows a workflow toward a defined goal
  • Goals map to work teams already do: book the tour, collect the rent, sign the renewal
  • Operators now control the steps the AI follows, mirroring how they train staff onsite

Why Leasing Is the Place to Start

  • Leasing represents the repetitive, high-volume work teams handle every day
  • The old five point follow-up has become 8 to 9 touches per prospect to convert
  • AI works the weekend leads so agents start Monday on tours instead of backlog

Who EliseAI Serves

  • The platform crossed 6 million units earlier this year, roughly 1 in 6 US apartments
  • Clients range from top 50 operators to regional operators with a few hundred units
  • Over a billion AI conversations give the platform context on industry edge cases

Speed as the Metric Owners Miss

  • The industry tracks conversion rates closely and speed almost not at all
  • A 20% lead-to-tour rate achieved in two hours beats the same rate in two days
  • An assistant manager calls one delinquent resident at a time; AI calls the building
  • Faster cycles give owners earlier visibility into collections, renewals, and leasing velocity

Rethinking the ROI Question

  • Operators who never calculated the ROI of a leasing agent struggle to value the AI doing that work
  • The 2025 conversation was about ROI; the 2026 conversation is about creating value
  • Freed capacity opens the door to restructuring teams, not just cutting tasks

Deciding Where Humans Step In

  • Human Touch Automations let operators choose where staff enter the customer journey
  • One example is a personal call two hours before a scheduled tour
  • The test is whether the customer wants that touchpoint, not whether the team is used to it
  • Automating administrative work finally gives teams room to deliver the service they advertise

The Voice AI Misconception

  • Owners calling their own properties judge voice AI against old press-one phone trees
  • Consumers using AI daily are increasingly comfortable talking to it on the phone

Voice AI routes callers to the right person instead of forcing them through a menu

Regional dialects lifted both engagement and tour bookings in beta testing

What Voice AI Replaces

After-hours answering services and overflow call centers become optional

Call scoring rates every leasing agent call against a rubric, replacing quarterly mystery shops

Self-learning feeds those conversations back into the AI to improve automation rates

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Round of Insights

Failure that set Jacob up for success: Charging ahead on change initiatives without bringing his team members along, which rubbed people the wrong way. It taught him that change management requires as much communication with counterparts, ownership groups, and regional managers as it does with onsite teams.

Digital or mobile resource: IBM’s YouTube channel for understanding AI concepts, use cases, and terminology.

Book recommendation: Deep Work by Cal Newport, which broke his belief in multitasking.

Daily habit: Stretching and morning mobility work before starting the day.

#1 insight for implementing AI into your business: Ask questions. Most operators have never done this before, and a recent 350 person survey found 28% named a lack of internal talent as a barrier to adoption.

Favorite restaurant in Chicago, IL: The Izakaya.

Next Steps

  • Learn more about EliseAI here: eliseai.com
  • Explore EliseAI case studies, change management toolkits, and industry surveys
  • Audit which onsite tasks are repetitive enough to hand to AI
  • Document your follow-up workflows before you automate them
  • Start tracking response speed alongside conversion rates
  • Decide where human touchpoints genuinely improve the customer experience
  • Ask vendors questions early instead of waiting to build internal expertise

Thank you for joining us for another great episode! If you’re enjoying the show, please LEAVE A RATING OR REVIEW, and be sure to hit that subscribe button so you don’t miss an episode.