You signed a deal with EasyKnock between 2019 and 2024. You sold them the house. You kept living in it. You were told you could buy it back, or keep renting, or walk away. In December 2024, EasyKnock stopped originating new deals and started winding the business down.
If you are still in one of those contracts, your lease is probably being serviced, your house is probably owned by an EasyKnock-affiliated special-purpose entity, and the question you need answered in the next thirty days is: who is my landlord now, and what are my options under the contract I actually signed?
The rest of this piece is the long version. It exists because most of the coverage of EasyKnock's wind-down has been written for real estate trade publications, not for the homeowners living inside the contracts.
2016 — The launch. EasyKnock is founded by Jarred Kessler in New York. The pitch is that homeowners who need cash but do not want to move can "sell and stay" — sell the house to EasyKnock, collect the equity, sign a lease, and keep their keys. A newer product than the old-school sale-leaseback, and one that quickly attracts venture funding.
2019–2022 — Rapid growth. EasyKnock expands to dozens of states. It offers three main products: Sell and Stay, Home Equity Agreement, and MoveAbility. It closes on thousands of homes, mostly in the Sun Belt. Venture rounds in this period put the company's valuation in the hundreds of millions.
2023 — Massachusetts Attorney General settlement. The office of then-AG Andrea Joy Campbell announces a settlement with EasyKnock over allegations that the company's products functioned, in practice, as high-cost loans dressed up as real-estate transactions. Source: Mass AG office press release, 2023. The settlement does not force EasyKnock to unwind existing contracts. It does put the rest of the industry on notice.
2024 — The Warren inquiry. Senator Elizabeth Warren sends a formal letter to EasyKnock and to Kessler personally, asking for data on contract outcomes, fee structures, and the demographics of customers served. Source: Senator Warren oversight letters page. The letter is not a subpoena. It is public. Trade publications cover it. EasyKnock's public relations posture shifts noticeably afterward.
December 2024 — The wind-down. EasyKnock announces it is no longer originating new products and will wind down the business. The announcement is careful. It does not say "bankruptcy." It does not say "receivership." It says the company is transitioning out of consumer-facing products. For customers still inside existing contracts, the announcement raises more questions than it answers.
2025–2026 — The aftermath. Contracts are still being serviced. Leases are still being collected. Buyback options are, in most cases, still on the table — though "on the table" depends heavily on which SPE holds your deed and which servicer is now collecting your rent. This is the part that is genuinely confusing, and it is where homeowners who were told in 2022 "you can buy it back anytime" are finding out in 2026 that the entity they signed with is not the entity they are now writing checks to.
This is the operative section. Print it and keep it on your fridge.
If you signed between 2019 and 2024, there is a stack of documents somewhere — a purchase agreement, a lease, a repurchase option addendum, and a disclosure packet. You may also have an e-signature receipt from DocuSign. Gather all of it before you do anything else. If you cannot find it, the servicer is required to send you a copy on request. Ask in writing.
This is not rhetorical. In a lot of these deals, the house is held by a special-purpose entity — "EasyKnock SPV 2021-3," or similar — that may or may not still be affiliated with the original parent company after the wind-down. You can find out by pulling the deed from your county recorder's office. It costs five to twenty dollars. Do not skip this step.
Most EasyKnock contracts include a right to buy the house back at a pre-agreed formula — often original sale price plus a specified percentage, plus any outstanding fees. That clause is usually still enforceable even after the wind-down, but only if you exercise it within the window your contract specifies. Some of those windows are three years. Some are five. Some are tied to lease renewals. Miss the window, and the clause evaporates.
When you ask about the status of your contract, your repurchase rights, and the identity of the current owner, do it on paper with a tracking number. Email gets lost or ignored. Certified mail goes into a file the servicer is legally obligated to keep. If there is ever a dispute later, the paper trail is what matters.
The rule of thumb
If you were told "you can buy the house back anytime," and that promise was verbal and not in the contract, it is not a promise. It is a marketing statement. Treat the contract as the only binding document.
A housing attorney — specifically one who has handled sale-leaseback disputes or SPE-related title issues — will cost you somewhere between $300 and $750 for an initial consultation. That is cheap compared to the equity at stake. A real estate agent cannot help you here. Their incentive is to list the property, not to untangle the contract.
The wind-down of EasyKnock matters for a reason beyond the individual homeowners in their portfolio. It matters because the entire "sell and stay" category was built on a single assumption: that the operator would still be around when the homeowner needed to exercise an option years later. When the operator exits the category, every contract holder suddenly learns whether their exit clause depends on the operator's ongoing presence or is independent of it.
Most sale-leaseback contracts written in the last decade assume operator continuity. They assume the operator will answer the phone, process the buyback paperwork, and release the deed back. When the operator is no longer a going concern — or no longer treating that business line as strategic — the homeowner discovers that the operator's attention is a kind of collateral, and collateral can be withdrawn.
— The part nobody wrote about in the trade press
This is why, on the question of "which leaseback company should I pick," the identity of the buyer matters more than the price. We have written a longer piece on what to look for in a leaseback operator that covers this in detail. The short version: prefer an aggregator model over a single-buyer model, prefer operators with institutional investor backing over venture-backed startups, and prefer operators whose business model does not depend on originating new deals to service old ones.
Some homeowners reading this are going to find that their buyback window has already closed, or that the numbers no longer work at today's home values. In that case, the remaining options are:
For homeowners in the middle of a payment crisis — not just mid-contract confusion, but an active inability to make the next rent payment — the foreclosure playbook walkthrough is relevant even though your situation is technically not a foreclosure. The procedural steps overlap. The emotional steps overlap even more.
The EasyKnock story is not a story about a bad company. It is a story about a business model that only works at scale, in a continuously growing market, with continuous venture funding to paper over the unit economics. When any of those three conditions fail, the business contracts, and the homeowners inside the existing portfolio find out that their contracts are a derivative of the operator's willingness to keep servicing them.
That is worth remembering the next time anyone — including us — points you toward a sale-leaseback product. Every instrument has a failure mode. The failure mode of a HELOC is the draw period ending and the payment ballooning. The failure mode of a sale-leaseback is the operator losing interest. We have written the longer piece on what a well-structured leaseback looks like precisely because most of the ones written in the category so far have been structured around the wrong failure mode.
If you are reading this piece because you never actually signed with EasyKnock but you are weighing a sale-leaseback now and this story made you nervous — good. Read the walkthrough of what to do when refinancing is off the table first. Compare every path in that piece against the five questions in the what-to-look-for piece above. The answer is not always a leaseback. Sometimes the answer is that the HELOC failure mode, as bad as it is, is still the one you can manage better.
If you are a homeowner with an active EasyKnock contract and you read this far, write to editorial@leaseback.com with the year you signed, the state you are in, and the product you bought. We are tracking the post-wind-down experiences of actual customers. We will not name you unless you ask us to. We will not sell your data. We are trying to document what is actually happening, because the trade press is not doing it.
The CFPB consumer complaint portal is also where formal complaints go if you believe your contract terms are being violated. It is free. It creates a public record. Use it.