Evernest Property Management Review: 6% Fee, Poplar's 2025 California Order, $13,850 EPA Penalty

What Evernest is, and what it has bought

Evernest says it manages single-family houses, condos and small multifamily buildings, and its homepage lists 56 markets from Atlanta to Winston-Salem. Its owner FAQ says it was “Established in 2008” as a manager of its own rental properties; the BBB lists a business start date of March 1, 2005. The company is headquartered at 1 Independence Plaza in Birmingham, Alabama. It sells management and brokerage and says it also handles rehabs. Most of what we can document about its size is a list of purchases of other managers:

Evernest acquisitions and mergers, as announced (company press releases; totals are the company's own wording)

The twelve deals that give an “approximately” count add up to 3,300 homes; with the three “more than” counts (500, 100 and 100) it is at least about 4,000 homes bought before counting Poplar, Elara, Legacy, Dodson and Alpha's 100 (our sum). Evernest's newsroom pages for most deals carry no date, so the order above follows the totals the company printed, not the calendar. For an owner whose house was managed by a company Evernest bought, the practical points are in the company's own words: the Dodson release says that after August 1, 2022 “Dodson signage will change to Evernest”, and Evernest's Poplar release calls it “Evernest’s largest to date”. Our property management fee guide lists what listed landlords pay their managers for comparison.

The SEC record is one filing. Evernest, LLC (CIK 1937138, Birmingham, Alabama, issuer address 1 Independence Plaza, Suite 616) filed a Form D on July 12, 2022 under Rule 506(b) for a debt offering: $2,500,000 offered and sold to 11 investors, minimum investment $100,000, first sale May 23, 2022, no sales commissions (accession 0001937138-22-000001). We found no other filing under that CIK. This is the company raising money for itself; it is not an investment product for owners. “Evernest Financial Advisors, LLC”, which files Forms 13F, is a different name and we found no link to the property manager.

The fee schedule Evernest posts: one page template for 48 cities

Evernest runs a separate website for most markets (atlantapropertymanagement.com, memphisproperty.management and so on). We read the pricing page of all 48 and found the same fee text on every one, whether the city is Memphis or the Bay Area.

Evernest's posted terms for owners (identical on 48 pricing pages, read November 12, 2026)

Three things stand out. First, a percentage fee scales with rent, and the pages print no floor: 6% is $108 a month on an $1,800 rent. Second, the two statements about leaving differ: one gives a 30-day notice, the other says cancel at any time without penalty, and the owner FAQ gives neither. We have not seen the agreement, which is where an early-termination fee, a fee on tenants Evernest placed or a lease-up fee would sit, so ask for it before you sign. Third, the pages list no markup on vendor work, but they also do not say whether Evernest keeps vendor rebates. When the DRE audited the Poplar business in 2022, it recorded a management fee of “$50 to $100 per month and/or between 5 and 8 percent of the monthly rents collected”, so the schedule above is not the one Poplar owners had then.

What one $1,800 rental costs: Evernest against two Mynd cities (our arithmetic)

We take a house that rents for $1,800 a month ($21,600 a year), one home, rent collected all twelve months, no repairs, and two kinds of year: a year with a renewal and a year with a new tenant placed (one leasing fee of 50% of a month's rent, $900, which is above Evernest's $500 minimum). Mynd's fees are the ones its Dallas and Memphis pages posted on the same date (we cover them in full in our Mynd review).

Fees on an $1,800 monthly rent (our arithmetic)

At this rent Evernest is cheaper than both Mynd cities, by $423 against Dallas and $152 against Memphis in a renewal year (our arithmetic). The ranking flips as rent rises: 6% equals Mynd's $129 a month at $2,150 of rent and its $139 at $2,316.67, so a higher-rent house pays Evernest more. The two companies sell different things around the fee: Evernest's pages list an opt-in eviction plan and a pet-damage guarantee and charge an annual inspection; Mynd's list a rental income guarantee and a $3,000 eviction plan. Neither number includes repairs, a maintenance reserve you must hold ($500 at Evernest), or the months a house sits empty. If you finance the house, a lender counts the rent and the management fee in the coverage ratio; our DSCR loan requirements page lists published minimums, and our landlord census shows who owns these houses and how many do.

The regulator record: Evernest's California licenses and Poplar's cases

Managing rentals for others requires a real estate broker license in California, so the Department of Real Estate (DRE) public lookup is the cleanest regulator record we could reach. We searched it by name on November 11, 2026 (the record time) and pulled the licenses below.

California DRE licenses connected to Evernest (public lookup, November 11, 2026)

The last row is a finding in itself. Evernest's homepage footer says “Consumer protection notice California DRE 01866193”, and the pricing pages for the Bay Area, Long Beach, Los Angeles, Orange County, Sacramento, San Diego and Santa Cruz print the same number. On the DRE lookup, that number is a Long Beach corporation named Trimetro Management Corporation whose license expired on June 12, 2025. Evernest's own California corporation appears under 02307414. We do not know why the old number remains; it may be a company Evernest acquired, or an unedited footer. It means a California owner cannot check Evernest's license from the number it prints.

Name search also returns three other California licensees with “Evernest” in the name: Evernest Realty California Corp. (Montebello), Evernest Realty Group (Glendale) and CA Dream Home Group Inc., which does business as Evernest Real Estate Advisors and Evernest Mortgage Advisors (Pasadena) and is the respondent in a separate DRE case, H-42694 LA. We found no document linking any of them to Evernest Holdings, LLC. If you read an “Evernest” disciplinary record, check which company it names.

The three DRE cases on these licenses, from the documents

What these show, and what they do not. All three concern the record of Poplar's California brokerage or of one individual, not of Evernest Real Estate Corp., whose license is clean at the corporate level and was issued six months after Evernest's announcement. Evernest's Poplar release is dated January 22, 2025 and the order in H-12730 SF took effect 29 days later, on February 20, 2025; the documents we read do not say whether Evernest bought the OneRent corporation or its business, and the OneRent license ran to November 23, 2025. The stayed suspension becomes permanent only if no further cause arises within two years of February 20, 2025, so that window runs to February 20, 2027. What the cases do show is the failure mode an out-of-state owner worries about: a manager that holds rents and deposits in trust accounts it did not reconcile. In 2022 OneRent's security-deposit account held roughly $2.04 million, and the shortage found was $2,980.00, a timing gap of a few weeks that the accusation still alleged was a violation (the journal entry was recorded December 16, 2022 and the funds arrived January 9, 2023). The earlier case is larger. We also note that the 2024 accusation records that OneRent ran a “Rent Guarantee Program” paid from its own business account; the Evernest pages we read describe no rent guarantee.

Evernest operates in many other states. We could not read the Alabama Real Estate Commission's lookup (our connection was refused), and we did not read the Texas, Georgia, Colorado, Tennessee or other registers, so this page says nothing about discipline there. Our LLC guide covers the ownership side of holding such houses.

The EPA order for Poplar's South Carolina leases

On September 17, 2025, EPA Region 4 filed a consent agreement and final order, docket TSCA-04-2025-6104(b), in the matter of Evernest Holdings, LLC, formerly known as Poplar Homes South Carolina, LLC. It assesses a civil penalty of $13,850. The document says an EPA inspector visited Poplar Homes' place of business on June 27, 2024 and that Poplar submitted records on July 18, 2024. For two pre-1978 houses in South Carolina (leases signed October 1, 2022 and March 6, 2023), EPA alleged that Poplar, as the leasing agent, did not give the tenants the lead hazard pamphlet or include the required lead warning statement, the lessor's disclosure or the agent's statement in the leases, and that, having agreed to perform renovations under its management agreements, it lacked the EPA's lead-safe renovation firm certification. Under the order Evernest Holdings, LLC, which the document says acquired Poplar in December 2024, “has agreed to assume the responsibility for resolving the alleged violations by Poplar Homes and to pay the assessed penalty”. The parties consented to the order “without adjudication of any issues of law or fact”. One detail is worth noting: the document puts the acquisition in December 2024, while Evernest's press release is dated January 22, 2025.

The court record: an owner-versus-manager appeal in Georgia

We could not run a federal docket search: CourtListener's API returned HTTP 401 and its website and Justia returned 403, so we cannot give a count of federal cases. The record we could read is one appellate opinion. In Metro Holdings, LLC et al. v. Evernest Holdings, LLC, No. A25A0993 (decided October 21, 2025), the Georgia Court of Appeals vacated a trial court's order that had struck an affidavit and granted Evernest summary judgment, and sent the case back. The opinion, which does not decide who is right, describes two landlords who hired Evernest to manage metro-Atlanta rentals, two tenants placed in 2021 and 2022 who defaulted, and a suit alleging that Evernest failed to verify the information on the rental applications. It quotes the contracts: Evernest did not warrant that tenants would perform their leases, but it agreed to indemnify the landlords for liability arising from its performance or failure to perform its obligations under the agreement. That is the clause an owner should read before relying on any manager's tenant screening. The remand has not, as far as we can read, been decided. We found no owner class action and no state attorney general action against Evernest in the sources we could reach, but with federal and several state searches blocked, that is an absence in our reading, not a clearance.

Complaints and reviews

BBB (page read November 12, 2026 through a page-reading tool, because the BBB blocks direct requests): Evernest has an A+ rating and has been BBB Accredited since March 28, 2024. The profile shows 246 complaints in the last 3 years, 48 of them in the last 12 months, and 94 customer reviews, and says the counts include the headquarters and corporate-owned locations. The complaints page lists by type:

BBB complaints by type (sum 246; the page gives no date range)

Billing and repair together are two thirds of the count (163 of 246, our arithmetic). The BBB does not separate owners from residents, so we cannot say whose complaints these are. Trustpilot (context only): a TrustScore of 1.9 on 121 reviews, 12% five-star and 86% one-star, 60 of them in the last 12 months, on a profile claimed by the company. We did not score review sites; we count them.

Evernest's own numbers do not agree

How big Evernest says it is, by page (November 12, 2026)

The pricing pages say 12,000 homes while the newsroom says over 20,000 and, in January 2025, nearly 23,000 units; the 23,000 may count units rather than homes, and the 12,000 may be an old figure, but a reader cannot tell. The fall from nearly 23,000 (January 2025) to over 20,000 (September 2025) is also unexplained in the documents we read. We use none of these as fact. The 48 pricing pages are the one count we could verify.

What a reader can do with this

1. Ask for the management agreement before you sign. Evernest's pages do not publish it and say a copy is sent on request. Read the termination, renewal, lease-up, vendor-rebate and indemnification clauses; the Georgia opinion shows what the screening and indemnity wording does and does not promise.
2. Ask which Evernest entity signs and which license it holds in your state. Look the number up on your state regulator's site. In California, the number printed on Evernest's sites is not its own corporation's.
3. Ask where your security deposit and rents are held and how often the account is reconciled. The two California cases were about exactly this for Poplar's business, which Evernest bought.
4. Compute your own cost. At $1,800 a month, Evernest's posted fees are 7.8% of rent in a renewal year and 10.9% with a new tenant, before repairs, the $500 maintenance reserve and vacancy; above roughly $2,150 to $2,320 of monthly rent, a flat-fee manager is cheaper.
5. If you bought one of the local companies Evernest absorbed, ask which agreement now governs. The Dodson release says signage would change after August 1, 2022 and tells clients to watch for changes to systems and contact information.
6. If you finance the house, line up the loan before the manager. Lenders count rent net of the management fee.

This is analysis of public documents, not investment, legal or tax advice.

FAQ

This is analysis of public documents, not investment, legal or tax advice. Sources: evernest.co homepage, owner FAQ, Our Process, maintenance services page, newsroom and its press releases, and the pricing pages of 48 Evernest city sites (read November 12, 2026; the company's own claims); California Department of Real Estate public license lookup for licenses 02307414, 01967081, 01866193, 02253495, 01527560 and 02094465 (record time-stamped November 11, 2026) and its documents in cases H-12487 SF (accusation October 20, 2020; stipulation and order effective November 24, 2021), H-12730 SF (accusation May 28, 2024; stipulation and order effective February 20, 2025, a scanned PDF we transcribed) and H-7382 SAC (accusation September 25, 2024; order effective March 26, 2025); EPA Region 4 consent agreement and final order, docket TSCA-04-2025-6104(b), filed September 17, 2025; Metro Holdings, LLC et al. v. Evernest Holdings, LLC, Georgia Court of Appeals No. A25A0993 (October 21, 2025); SEC EDGAR full-text search and the Form D of Evernest, LLC (CIK 1937138, accession 0001937138-22-000001); Bizwest, “Onsite Property Management acquired by Alabama firm” (October 3, 2022); Mile High CRE, “Evernest Acquires Legacy Property Management” (January 5, 2022); Mynd's Dallas and Memphis market pages (November 12, 2026); BBB and Trustpilot pages read November 12, 2026 through a page-reading tool. The Alabama Real Estate Commission lookup refused our connection; CourtListener returned HTTP 401 and Justia HTTP 403; Texas, Georgia, Colorado and other state lookups were not read; none is scored. Sums, shares and break-evens are our arithmetic and are not a quote.