Sale-Leaseback Your Home: the Deed, the Rent and the Option, Priced

Updated August 13, 2026. Quick answer: three documents are signed at once — a deed, a lease and an option — and each one moves in the same direction. The deed takes the house. The lease charges rent set against the cash you were advanced, not against the house. The option is the way back, and it is priced. Michigan’s Attorney General put the conclusion in writing about the largest operator of these deals, and that company is now described in the settlement itself as non-operational. This page is the arithmetic and the documents, and it sells nothing.

It is three documents, and only one of them is the sale

A sale-leaseback is marketed as one transaction and executed as three. The deed conveys the house. The lease makes you the tenant of the buyer. The option is a contractual right to buy the house back at a stated price, for a stated period. Read separately they are ordinary instruments. Read together, one complaint argues, the differences from a mortgage are vocabulary:

“Thus, the only differences between a residential mortgage loan and a “Sell & Stay” transaction are cosmetic, not substantive: i.e., a. where a typical mortgage uses the term “monthly payment,” the “Sell & Stay” uses the term “rent”; b. where a typical mortgage uses the term “loan amount,” the “Sell & Stay” transaction uses the term “purchase price less option agreement”; and c. where a typical mortgage uses the term “mortgage,” the “Sell & Stay” transaction uses the term “deed.”” — Zeld v. EasyKnock, Compl. para 37

That is a pleading, not a ruling — a plaintiff’s characterisation, filed in a federal court and quoted here as such. What follows is labelled the same way throughout: what a regulator concluded, what a company signed, and what a plaintiff alleged are three different weights of evidence and this page does not blur them.

What a state regulator called it, in writing

On May 20, 2024 the Michigan Attorney General’s Corporate Oversight Division wrote to EasyKnock, Inc. The position it took is the single most useful sentence published about this product:

“Further, it is our position that EasyKnock’s sale-leaseback program constitutes a disguised loan with an effective annual interest rate in excess of Michigan’s civil usury statutes.” — Michigan Attorney General, Notice of Intended Action, May 20, 2024

The reason that is a live argument rather than a naming quarrel is stated in the same letter’s footnote: “In applying Michigan’s usury statutes, courts look at “the real nature of the transaction,” not its form.” If the substance is a loan, then the usury ceiling, and the disclosure rules that come with lending, apply no matter what the paperwork is called. The letter also identified the gap that generates the complaints — “EasyKnock’s misleading marketing that consumers will receive “100% of your home’s value without having to move.””

One closing statement, and what came off the top

The clearest picture of the economics is a single homeowner’s HUD-1, reproduced in a complaint filed in the Eastern District of Michigan. These are allegations in a pleading, not findings of a court, and they describe one transaction rather than a market. They are here because they are the only itemised figures in the public record.

“$44,500 for the “option agreement,” which means that Defendants retained 25% of the purchase price of the home. b. $8,882.20 for a “processing fee,” which is 5% of the purchase price, or 6.65% of the actual proceeds of the house. c. $5,000 for a “repair fund.”” — Zeld v. EasyKnock, Inc., E.D. Mich. No. 2:24-cv-11703, Compl. para 149

The arithmetic on those three lines, against the stated purchase price of $178,000:

The complaint’s own second figure is the one worth checking, because it shows the deduction compounding: it describes the processing fee as 4.99% of the purchase price but 6.65% of the actual proceeds — and recomputing it here from the two dollar figures reproduces both, because the second percentage is taken against the price after the option fee has already gone. A discount is applied to a discount. Note also what the purchase price is not: the same complaint alleges the price itself sat below market value, so 67.2% of the purchase price is a smaller share of the house than it looks.

The rent is priced off the cash, and the way back is priced too

An ordinary tenant’s rent tracks what the home would let for. Here it is alleged to track the advance:

“Christine Zeld’s EasyKnock Lease: a. provided for an initial annual rent of approximately 13% of the funds advanced by EasyKnock, even accounting for real property taxes paid by EasyKnock on the home. b. provided that the initial annual rent increases each lease year by the greater of 2.5% or changes in the Consumer Price Index.” — Zeld v. EasyKnock, Compl. para 30a-b

Rent measured against the money advanced, escalating annually on a floor that does not go down, is the shape of interest rather than the shape of a housing market. And the option — the thing that makes this feel reversible — starts from a price that already has the option fee removed from it: “set Zeld’s Option Exercise Price at the stated Purchase Price, $178,000, less the Option Agreement Price of $44,500.” The fee that bought the option is not credited against the buy-back. It is spent.

What happened to the company, which is the fact that dates all of this

Massachusetts settled first. Its Assurance of Discontinuance, filed in Suffolk Superior Court, records the allegation and the payment:

“Based on the investigation, the AGO alleges that EasyKnock engaged in unfair and deceptive acts and practices in the process of marketing its Sale-Leaseback products and transacting with Massachusetts consumers, in violation of G.L. c. 93A.” — Massachusetts AG, Assurance of Discontinuance (Suffolk Superior Court), para 3

“On or before thirty (30) days from the Effective Date of this Assurance, EasyKnock shall pay $200,000 to the AGO” Michigan’s settlement followed, and it is the more consequential document of the two, for two reasons. The first is how it defines the company: “”EasyKnock” means EasyKnock, Inc., the now-non-operational corporation that offered homeowners unable to qualify for conventional credit”

The second is the scope of what the respondents agreed to stop, which reaches past sale-leasebacks into the products a homeowner would most likely be shown next:

“NESE, the EK RE entities, and EasyKnock shall not offer or engage in any transaction in which they purchase or acquire a lien or interest in a Michigan residential property, including but not limited to sale-leaseback transactions, home equity sharing agreements, and home equity investments.” — Michigan AG, Assurance of Voluntary Compliance No. 26-80-CP, para 5.2

“Within 30 days of the Effective Date of this Assurance, Respondents shall pay to the Attorney General the total sum of $85,000.” Against the figures in the section above, that is a settlement fund, not a remedy for the deals themselves. If you are reading this because a company is offering you a sale-leaseback today, the useful question is not whether this one behaved badly — it is which of these three documents your own contract would generate.

The provider still operating, and the thing it does not publish

The category did not end with one company. Truehold is currently operating, and its own site-wide legal disclosure answers the two questions that decide whether this is a bridge or a one-way door. On getting the house back:

“Truehold does not typically allow sellers to re-purchase the property after the sale.” — Truehold, site-wide legal disclosure

On how long you are guaranteed to stay: “you must adhere to lease terms for the minimum term (which ranges from 6 – 24 months) to continue living in the home. This includes making timely rent payments, which may increase after the initial term.”

Read those together and the product is different from the one people picture. The occupancy that is actually promised is a lease minimum measured in months, and there is normally no route back to ownership at all. What the disclosure does not state — anywhere in the served text of the site, checked on 2026-08-13 — is the percentage of value a seller receives, or the fees. Those are the two numbers you would need to compare this against anything else, and their absence is the finding.

If someone is offering you one of these

Three requests, all of which a legitimate counterparty can answer in writing before you sign anything:

• The percentage, in dollars. Not “up to” a percentage of value — the actual figure that will appear on the closing statement, with every deduction itemised the way the table above itemises them.
• The rent, and what moves it. Ask what the escalator is and what its floor is. An escalator with a fixed floor is not a market rent.
• The way back, priced. Whether an option to repurchase exists at all, what it costs each year to keep it alive, and whether the fee already paid is credited against the buy-back price. If the answer to the last one is no, the option is a rental of a hope.

If the reason this product is on the table is that a mortgage or a line of credit was refused, the comparison worth making first is what a home equity agreement, a HELOC and a home equity loan each actually promise, because the federal protections that attach to two of those three do not attach to the third. If a reverse mortgage has been mentioned, the rules that govern what your family is left with are at what heirs actually owe.

What we could not establish, and are not going to invent

Stated plainly, because a page about a product that is accused of hiding its numbers has no business hiding its own limits.

• No court has ruled that any of this is a loan. Michigan’s position was stated in a pre-litigation letter and settled by agreement; the Massachusetts assurance expressly resolves allegations rather than establishing them; the federal complaint quoted here is a pleading. The question is live, not decided.
• The itemised figures come from one homeowner’s transaction, as alleged. They are not an average, a market rate, or a promise about what any other contract contains.
• Truehold’s percentage of value and fee schedule could not be established at all. They are not stated in the served text of its site. We are not estimating them from a competitor.
• Connecticut’s reported action is not cited here. Its attorney general is widely reported to have investigated the same company, but no filing or order was reachable on a state source, and this site does not cite a press aggregator for a legal fact.
• No effective annual rate is computed on this page. The figures needed to compute one honestly — the true market value at sale, and the full schedule of rent and option fees actually paid — are not all in the public record for any single transaction.

Sources

Every document below was read as a document on 2026-08-13 — the two assurances and the notice as filed PDFs from the attorneys general who issued them, the complaint from the court’s own docket, and the disclosure from the provider’s own site. No figure on this page rests on a news report or a review site.

General consumer information about a class of real-estate transaction, not legal, tax or financial advice. Allegations described above are allegations; settlements resolving them are not admissions and say so in their own text. Nothing is sold on this page, no product or service is recommended, and no company named here has any relationship with this site.