Greystar's New Head Of U.S. Property Management On Tech, Transformation And Transparency

For more than three decades, multifamily executive Toni Eubanks has had an ideal perch to observe and influence the changing apartment industry. After starting with Texas firm JPI, she’s never left her firm.

Greystar absorbed JPI in 2009, and since then, Eubanks has steadily risen the ranks to become executive director, now overseeing a real estate operation that encompasses 3,700 communities with nearly 1 million units.  

“No two days are ever the same,” she told Bisnow. “What has changed is we’ve gotten a lot more sophisticated with technology and the tools we use. Our industry has grown, and from that perspective, we’ve gotten a lot more in tune with caring for our residents and their homes.”

Recently promoted, Eubanks will assume the title of executive managing director of U.S. property management at Greystar beginning Jan. 1, 2026.  

Greystar launched a cost transparency tool, known as the Total Monthly Leasing Price Calculator, in July to help potential renters get a better handle on their monthly expenses in a Greystar property. Eubanks sees it as a means to move the entire industry toward more transparency. 

Like other large landlords and property owners, Greystar has faced scrutiny as the housing affordability crisis has become more acute. The firm reached a settlement with the Department of Justice — announced the same afternoon this phone interview took place — regarding the firm’s use of RealPage software for rental pricing. The company also has an ongoing lawsuit, filed in January, concerning the rental fees charged to tenants. 

Eubanks spoke about her vision for Greystar, the goals she will have when she assumes this new position, and her views on technology and its impact on the renter experience. 

This conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Bisnow: You helped spearhead the Total Monthly Leasing Price Calculator. Can you give me a sense of what the impetus for this was and when it started?  

Toni Eubanks: We’ve actually been working on that longer than the last couple of years. You can imagine, it's quite an industry change. We're really proud of where we are with that work. We were always disclosing the total monthly leasing price on a lease.

Now we just start much earlier in the process, disclosing what your total monthly check will be. And so that's really the difference. The consumers are seeing it earlier now. And like I said, we were working on that.

It feels like a while, but as you can imagine, with all the different [point-of-sale] systems, all the different integrations, it takes a minute, and we have almost 4,000 communities, so we've got to be very efficient with change and getting everybody to row in the same direction. 

Bisnow: If you could mandate a Greystar standard of how these fees are disclosed to the public, what would it look like? Where would those touchpoints be? What standard would the industry adopt?  

Eubanks: Selfishly, I like how we're doing it. So we show it a few different ways, actually. So you walk in any one of our communities that we manage or own, and you will see it printed. You see it printed, and it's in several different places throughout the clubhouse. 

If you're physically coming into the site, it's right there in front of you. And then if you're not, if you're leasing online, then you'll see it, depending on who the website provider is, you'll see it on the floor plans page, but it can vary just a little bit. What we've just introduced not long ago is an actual calculator, so you can go in and say, “OK, I want your A-1. I'm going to have two pets. I'm going to have a garage, storage, and this is how I live, utilitywise,” and then it'll spit out a price. So we feel like we're pretty well covered. 

Bisnow: Is the FTC lawsuit about hidden fees against Greystar still moving forward? And do you feel like the standard that you introduced, that you just went through, meets the requirements of being upfront?  

Eubanks: I would say, first of all, we've never said we've done anything wrong. Give us the rule book, and we'll follow the rule book, but it's hard for me. I can't really speak to a lot of the details right now, because the case is ongoing. But do we have pretty good indications that we think it'll be generally accepted? We do. But I can’t say much more than that, since it’s ongoing. 

Bisnow: As you mentioned before, there's a lot of tech gadgets out there, including tools to automate processes. I'm wondering how Greystar sees this technology and automation. How do you want to see that evolve within Greystar, and what do you want to be able to offer potential tenants? 

Eubanks: I'll answer that piece first. I think we always want to be a leader, as long as it makes sense, right? We're not going to deploy something just to deploy something, just because this product is popular today.

AI and all the things around that are changing so rapidly that we are really taking a thoughtful, deliberate approach to that. We're not just going to fling anything out there and hope that it benefits our owners and residents. We're going to study it. And we have a whole team of people where that’s all they're doing, studying to see how that works for us.  

Everybody talks about, “Oh, yeah, AI will do all these things, many of these on-site functions.” But I don't know for sure that we'll ever be in that school of thought, because we do believe that, like I said earlier, we’re in charge of people's homes, and we're trusted to take care of their homes and maintain their homes and just take care of the humans. And I think that you can't necessarily accomplish that with a chatbot.  

But are there functions, systems and different things, highly repetitive functions, that we could centralize or use some sort of AI feature? Absolutely. We’re making pretty good advances with centralizing our rent collections. It’s a function that’s repetitious, and those kinds of things are easier to automate or centralize. We have about 500 properties centralized with [accounts receivable and accounts payable], which gives a lot back to owners and is a competitive advantage to Greystar. We call it the Resource Center.  

Bisnow: Are you seeing challenges with tariffs, even with operations and getting things repaired?  

Eubanks: We're not as much in the era of scarcity, like we were during Covid. I remember it was difficult to get appliances at one point. I’m not hearing as much noise around that. But prices are going up. We have very good relationships with our vendors, and Greystar negotiates the biggest discounts that we can on behalf of our clients, probably the best in the industry.

But they’re still passing on increases to all our communities. So we’ll get the occasional email or memo saying we’ve got to raise this price 5% or 10%, and we’ll try and garner a discount because of our buying power. But it’s there, it’s a real thing.  

Bisnow: In terms of the bottom-line impact, is that starting to affect your business enough that this is being passed through to the renters, or is it just something where you have to eat those extra costs?

Eubanks: Right now, it's very much eating the extra cost, right? And that's fine. I’m not seeing that get passed back to renters yet.

Bisnow: Does Greystar use tenant screening technology?

Eubanks: We do have different ones. Yes, we do have different partners that we use. And you have to be compliant. In different places, there are certain things you can screen for and certain things you cannot. 

Bisnow: Can you name the ones you’re using, and also, how are you making sure that this is something that is abiding by fair housing rules and also offering potential tenants the ability to say, “Hey, I think that's a false positive, there’s an error in the system”?

Eubanks: There are methods for that, first and foremost. But also, it’s very local. Our screening approach is at the community level, based on where you are. We partner with several different firms, and I can't sit here and name them right off the top of my head, but we do partner with several.

We have people, and all they do every day is keep track of anything regulatory that's happening. I will say one thing you get from a shop like ours, a bigger shop like ours, is that we are very much examining these things before they become an issue. We call that looking for breadcrumbs. Are we compliant and doing it right? We always want to be out of the gray and do things the right way.

Bisnow: Are you finding a lot of value in those technologies, and that software in particular, in terms of finding quicker matches, finding the right people, things like that? And is this something where you're generating substantial fees from using this?

Eubanks: No, no, we're not generating substantial fees. As a matter of fact, we set a house rule many years ago for screening fees that's probably the lowest in the industry. But besides that, the other thing that we're faced with as an industry is fraud. We're finding it particularly prevalent in certain markets. And so these tools are helping us.

In some of our markets, 50% of our applicants are fraudulent applicants. It's our responsibility to catch those, you know, so that we can avoid that kind of disruption at the community level, for the owner and team members. We’re trying to stay very on top of that.

Bisnow: What kind of cost does that fraud bring into your organization? Because those are pretty incredible numbers of people trying to fraudulently apply. So I imagine that explains why you invest in this technology. That's a pretty big cost.

Eubanks: I don't have exact numbers on it, but, you know, you can’t only look at it from the pure like, this cost me whatever it costs to run the application. Because then I need to generate X more traffic to walk in the door. It's a much bigger number than you can possibly imagine, because it's not just the cost of screening, it’s marketing, it’s the salaries of the on-site team and the time they take to tour someone who is a fraudulent applicant. 

Bisnow: When you say 50% of applicants in some markets are fraudulent, does that mean they are completely fake, using forged documents and trying to pull a fast one, or is it like there's something that might be wrong with their application? Like they got some numbers wrong in an old address? 

Eubanks: No, it’s intentional, not that they got something wrong. A few weeks ago, I was in one community in particular, and they were like, “Half of the applicants we get aren’t going to clear because they’re not real applicants.”

Bisnow: In regards to the RealPage settlement, it specifically says you can't use nonpublic data and other competitors’ information. Are you able to use your own data for rent-setting? I mean, you have so much data because of your scale and scope, I imagine that would actually be a pretty useful proxy for doing that.

Eubanks: I don’t know if I can answer that specifically. [Greystar has issued statements about this case.]

Bisnow: With this new position and role, do you have any particular priorities that you're really focused on, the top one or two things that I really want to be working on in the new year?

Eubanks: A couple big focuses of ours, one, we want to operate very close to the real estate. No matter what level you are in the company, we want to be very close to what's happening on the real estate and take care of our people.

The second thing is, we're always talking about development and succession planning, developing our people just to have a great bench, because we want our company to be evergreen and be able to grow great leaders, and hopefully they stay with us and the responsibility is on us to take care of those good people, and we really try to.

And then the third thing I'm always going to be watching out for, for our company, is risk mitigation. It's something, years ago, we probably didn’t spend a whole lot of time on it in our industry. When you're taking care of as many people as we're taking care of, it's important to keep an eye on that.