A lawyer for Vision did not return a request for comment.

The lawsuit identified at least 150 homeowners in New York who had entered into contracts with Vision, which at its peak owned more than 5,000 homes across the country. It was filed more than a year after lawyers from the financial services department went to court to compel Vision to comply with an administrative demand seeking documents and business records.

“We took this action to protect New York consumers by putting an end to these illegal, predatory and unconscionable business practices,” said Linda A. Lacewell, New York’s superintendent of financial services.

The financial services agency opened its investigation of Vision after The New York Times published a series of articles in 2016 about the postcrisis revival in the so-called seller-financing of rundown homes in deals like rent-to-own leases. The series focused on a number of national firms that had acquired cheap foreclosed homes in the wake of the crisis, including thousands of homes sold by Fannie Mae, one of the big government-controlled mortgage finance firms.

Two years ago, Fannie Mae agreed to stop selling foreclosed homes to Vision and other firms like it after the prodding of Representative Elijah E. Cummings, a Maryland Democrat and the ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Mr. Cummings had sent a letter to Fannie’s regulator, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, urging it to stop the home sales after The Times reported on some of Vision’s business practices in Baltimore.

The suit is the state’s second strong message to rent-to-own firms that use aggressive tactics some consider predatory. Just last fall, the New York attorney general reached a settlement with a number of trailer park operators that gave hundreds of people who signed rent-to-own leases the right to tear up those deals and recoup any deposits they had paid toward their mobile homes.