FirstKey Homes

Independent Sources

Shown for context — not merged with USAComplaints' own numbers.

Contacts & Login

• Official website (blocked automated access when checked): https://www.firstkeyhomes.com/
• Phone listed on BBB: 844-395-3959
• General assistance (Help Center): [email protected]
• Resident portal / maintenance requests: https://fss.firstkeyhomes.com/
• Pay rent by phone: 800-528-0500

Locations

Renting from FirstKey Homes? How to handle a problem

FirstKey Homes is a single-family rental landlord and property manager; court filings show FirstKey entities acting as agent for property-owning entities. FirstKey's main website blocked automated access when this page was checked, but its online Help Center opened. It lists these official channels: general email [email protected], phone 844-395-3959, an online request form (support.firstkeyhomes.com/hc/en-us/requests/new) and maintenance requests through the resident portal at fss.firstkeyhomes.com. For a maintenance emergency the Help Center says to call 844-395-3959 right away, and to call 911 if conditions are life-threatening. It also asks new residents to complete the move-in inspection in the portal within four days of the lease start date, which is worth doing carefully because it documents the home's condition.

• Put repair requests and disputes in writing — email or a tenant-portal message, not just a phone call — and keep copies, dated photos, and a log of when you reported each problem. If a dispute ever reaches a housing agency, small-claims court, or a rent-escrow proceeding, this record is what you'll rely on.
• Read your own lease's fee, utility-transfer, and move-out terms carefully. The North Carolina case described below involved FirstKey tenants who were required to transfer utilities into their own names and ended up with unexpected fees — a reminder to check exactly what your lease and any utility-transfer notice actually require before you act on it.
• If a problem goes unresolved, you can escalate. Start with FirstKey's own channels above; the same number, (844) 395-3959, appears on its Better Business Bureau profile, where you can also file a complaint. Your state attorney general's consumer protection office is another route — the North Carolina case below shows that AG complaints can lead to refunds, though not every case ends that way.
• Some states give tenants a legal remedy for unrepaired conditions, such as depositing rent with a court instead of paying the landlord directly (rent escrow). In Ohio, for example, an appeals court in Johnson v. First Key Homes, L.L.C. (below) affirmed releasing escrowed rent to a tenant after the landlord failed to provide the Ohio notice address state law requires, and the tenant's testimony about unaddressed mold went uncontroverted. Rules like this vary a great deal by state and city — check with your state or local housing agency, or a legal aid organization, before withholding or escrowing rent yourself.
• If you receive an eviction filing, respond by the deadline on the paperwork. Local legal aid organizations can advise on your specific situation and deadlines.

North Carolina: 161 tenants got refunds after a utility-fee problem (May 2025)

On May 19, 2025, North Carolina Attorney General Jeff Jackson's office announced it had helped 161 North Carolina tenants secure refunds from FirstKey Homes “after tenants were mistakenly required to transfer utilities to their name and incurred significant and unexpected fees.” The office said it had received two consumer complaints alleging FirstKey required tenants to transfer utility accounts into their own names “despite their leases instructing them not to do so.” After the office contacted the company, FirstKey “identified 159 other people who received a similar notice,” agreed to pay tenants “200 percent of the incurred fees” and $250 to those told to transfer utilities who did not incur fees, and said it would improve communication about lease inquiries and work with a law firm to review its internal policies. Jackson was quoted saying: “I thank FirstKey for acting quickly to fix this problem and giving affected tenants their money back.”

This was a complaint-mediation outcome, not an enforcement lawsuit. The release describes FirstKey issuing refunds after the attorney general's office raised the issue.

What FirstKey's utility policy says now. FirstKey's Help Center says that in most cases utilities are set up automatically by FirstKey and managed by YES Energy Management, with exceptions: in Texas residents set up electric service themselves, and in North Carolina residents set up and manage all utility accounts. Check the Utilities article and your own lease for the rule that applies to your home.

Company background

FirstKey Homes, LLC was launched in September 2015 as an affiliate of FirstKey Holdings, LLC, according to a September 9, 2015 PR Newswire release announcing “the launch of FirstKey Homes, LLC … a new affiliate company dedicated to managing single-family rental (SFR) homes.” The new company took over management of “more than 4,200” single-family rental homes formerly owned by Building and Land Technology; the release said those homes had been “acquired by an affiliate of Cerberus Capital Management, L.P., the majority owner of FirstKey Holdings.”

In April 2024, a PR Newswire release datelined Marietta, Georgia announced a leadership transition: Colleen Keating stepped down as CEO, with board member Chan Galbato — described as Executive Chairman and as CEO of Cerberus Operations and Advisory Company — and Brendan Garvey named Lead Director. The release's boilerplate described FirstKey Homes as “a privately-owned, single-family rental home property management company with corporate headquarters in Marietta, Georgia.” No successor CEO was named in that release.

FirstKey's Better Business Bureau profile lists its headquarters at 600 Galleria Pkwy SE, Suite 300, Atlanta, GA 30339 — an address in the Cumberland/Galleria area. This page uses the BBB address for the headquarters record below while noting the company's own 2024 release describes its headquarters as Marietta, Georgia.

For example, an Ohio Court of Appeals case captions the landlord as “FirstKey Homes of Ohio, LLC, as agent for FKH SFR Propco B HLD, LP.” In a 2022 Georgia Court of Appeals case, First Key Homes of Georgia, LLC and a separate entity, Cerberus SFR Holdings II, L.P., appeared together as co-defendants. This page does not go further than what those filings themselves show.

Not the same company: FirstKey Mortgage is a separate business, also organized under FirstKey Holdings, focused on mortgage securitization rather than rental housing. First Key Realty, a real estate business based in Brooklyn, New York, is a separate business; no affiliation with FirstKey Homes was identified in the sources checked.

Complaint record: USAComplaints, BBB, Trustpilot, and ComplaintsBoard, reported separately

Four sources track FirstKey Homes' complaint and review history, each measuring something different, and this page reports every one of them on its own rather than blending them into a single figure:

• USAComplaints: 0 complaints submitted about FirstKey Homes so far.
• BBB: FirstKey Homes has been BBB Accredited since April 2019, carrying an A+ business rating alongside 1,246 complaints in the last three years (369 closed in the last 12 months). Of the 10 complaints BBB displays in detail, 8 are marked Answered and 2 Resolved, and 8 of the 10 concern “Service or Repair Issues” — for instance, a complaint dated September 10, 2026 describing a recurring maintenance problem, and another from the same date disputing a $3,400 move-in charge (both as the consumers themselves described them, not independently verified). BBB's own customer-review tally sits at 1.79 out of 5 from 594 reviews.
• Trustpilot: a claimed profile (since August 2018) showing 4.8 out of 5 from 34,885 reviews, though Trustpilot flags the profile as having “no recent history of asking for reviews” and notes the company “replied to 16% of negative reviews.”
• ComplaintsBoard: 1.9 from 33 reviews and 49 complaints, as of its September 23, 2026 update.

Note what the A+ figure actually is: BBB's own business-accreditation rating, not a customer-satisfaction score — that's a separate number, the 1.79/5 above. Because each of these four counts covers a different population, time window, and methodology, none of them is added to or averaged with any other on this page.

Litigation record

A CourtListener RECAP search for “FirstKey Homes” or “First Key Homes” case names, run September 27, 2026, found 67 federal dockets. 44 of them list a FirstKey entity as the plaintiff, 41 of those in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia; where a nature-of-suit is listed on these, it is “Rent, Lease & Ejectment,” and among the ones that have closed, the median time to closing was about 26 days. Most of these dockets have no further entries publicly available on CourtListener, so their contents beyond the caption can't be confirmed — they are landlord-tenant matters that closed quickly, not confirmed eviction outcomes.

The remaining 23 federal dockets were filed against FirstKey by residents, job applicants, or employees, covering several kinds of claims: fair-housing and civil-rights accommodation claims, disability and employment claims under the ADA, wage-and-hour claims under the Fair Labor Standards Act — including Plunkett v. FirstKey Homes LLC (N.D. Tex., No. 3:23-cv-02684), filed December 5, 2023; on December 11, 2024 the court approved the parties' FLSA settlement “in its entirety” and administratively closed the case, and the parties filed a stipulation of dismissal on May 22, 2025 (settlement amount not verified for this page) — and claims under the Fair Credit Reporting Act. All of these are allegations from filings, not proven facts.

Three appellate decisions show a mixed record of different kinds: one substantive loss for FirstKey, one eviction it won, and one procedural ruling in its favor. In Johnson v. First Key Homes, L.L.C. (Ohio Court of Appeals, Twelfth District, decided March 17, 2025), the court affirmed release of escrowed rent to the tenant, holding the landlord had waived notice of the rent-escrow proceeding by not providing the tenant an Ohio address as required by law, and that the tenant's uncontroverted testimony that mold in the rental home was not addressed by the landlord supported releasing the escrowed rent to her. In FirstKey Homes of Ohio, LLC v. Howard-McClain (Ohio Court of Appeals, Twelfth District, decided July 28, 2025), the same appeals court upheld an eviction judgment FirstKey (acting as agent for FKH SFR Propco B HLD, LP) had won at trial, finding the tenants had waived an objection to unsworn testimony by not raising it at trial. In First Key Homes of Georgia, LLC v. Robinson (Georgia Court of Appeals, decided October 31, 2022), the court reversed a trial court's denial of a motion to disqualify the opposing counsel, in an interlocutory appeal brought by First Key Homes of Georgia, LLC and co-defendant Cerberus SFR Holdings II, L.P.; the opinion describes the underlying allegations: Robinson leased a home in Decatur, Georgia in January 2019, says he found mold throughout it and made multiple complaints that were allegedly ignored, and says he and his wife suffered physical effects. The appeal decided only the counsel-disqualification question, not those allegations.

Is FirstKey Homes Legitimate?

FirstKey Homes, LLC is a real, incorporated company — incorporated and started in mid-2015 according to its Better Business Bureau file — that has managed single-family rental homes since 2015, launched as an affiliate of FirstKey Holdings, LLC; the 2015 announcement said Cerberus Capital Management, L.P. was then the majority owner of FirstKey Holdings It has been BBB Accredited with an A+ rating since 2019, while also carrying 1,246 BBB complaints in the last three years and a 1.79-out-of-5 BBB customer-review score; its Trustpilot score is far higher, at 4.8 out of 5 from 34,885 reviews. It is the plaintiff in dozens of landlord-tenant court filings and has also been sued by residents, applicants, and employees on a range of claims; outcomes in the decisions reviewed for this page have gone both ways, including an Ohio appeal (Johnson, 2025) that went against FirstKey. In May 2025 it refunded 161 North Carolina tenants after the state attorney general's office raised a utility-fee issue. This page assigns FirstKey Homes no rating, score, or “scam” label of its own; readers can weigh the record above for themselves.

Court & Public Records

Frequently Asked Questions