Locked Out At 2 A.m. Due To Failed Smart Lock Battery, Prior Work Orders, No Physical Key, Now Charged For Locksmith + Drilled Lock

I live at a Greystar-managed property in Arizona with a smart lock that has a physical key cylinder, but we were never given a physical key, and maintenance stated they also did not have one available after hours.

We previously submitted a work order for a low lock battery that was later marked “closed.” The issue continued, so a second work order for the same battery problem was opened and is still open. The app showed repeated low-battery warnings before full failure.

At 2 a.m., after 8 hours of traveling, we returned home with our two-year-old and found the lock battery completely dead. Maintenance said they would try to open it and to cancel the locksmith we called who was 10 minutes out. Maintenance, who smelled of alcohol, came back 20 minutes later and said he doesn’t have the key. With no access to our home, we called the locksmith back and the wait was now 1 hour. At no point did maintenance ever tell us we couldn’t use a locksmith. The locksmith ultimately had to drill the lock to get us in and charged 374 dollars. The maintenance worker was nice enough to let us stay in a model home while we waited to avoid the 55 degree weather. However, the model home didn’t have toilet paper, formula for our kid, a crib, diapers, or any of the essentials we needed in our home. This also seems like a very unprofessional solution to a lockout caused by a failure on their part.

Management is now: •Refusing to reimburse the $374, and •Trying to charge us $300 for the drilled lock, saying we should have waited in a model unit until business hours.

Questions: 1. Under Arizona law, can a landlord rely only on a smart lock while never providing the mechanical key? 2. Can “no after-hours lockouts” override a maintenance-caused denial of access? 3. Can they charge us for drilling when the failure was due to unresolved maintenance?

TLDR: We put in a work order for our smart lock batteries to be replaced. They were never replaced and the smart lock completely died. We were never given a physical key and maintenance did not have the key after hours leading us to have a locksmith drill it out. Management said we shouldn’t have had the locksmith do that and we now owe 300 for the new lock and they won’t reimburse for the locksmith.

Location: Arizona