01 The explainer · In plain English
It's older than your bank. Fortune 500 companies do it with billion-dollar office towers. Homeowners just weren't invited. Until now.
You sell your house to an investor. You sign a lease on the same house. You keep living in it. You walk out with the equity — no debt, no monthly interest, no foreclosure clock. That's it. That's the whole thing. The rest of this page explains why most homeowners have never heard of it.
An investor buys your home at an agreed-upon price. The sale closes the way any real estate sale closes — title transfers, funds transfer, done. You're not borrowing money. You're selling an asset, and the proceeds hit your account.
At closing, you sign a residential lease on the same house. Term, rent, renewals — all negotiated up front, in writing, before you agree to sell. A good lease is the whole ballgame. A bad lease is where this industry earned its reputation.
The cash from the sale is yours — net of closing costs and any existing mortgage payoff. No installment payments. No interest compounding. No bank deciding what you're allowed to do with it. You use it to cover what needed covering, and you keep your keys.
Sale-leaseback isn't for everybody. It's for homeowners who have equity but can't — or shouldn't — tap it with a new loan. If you see yourself in one of these, keep reading.
The clock is running and a refinance takes 60–90 days you don't have. A sale-leaseback can close in 30, stop the auction, and leave you in the house you already live in.
Credit cards at 24%. Medical bills compounding. A HELOC would just add another monthly payment to the pile. Selling the equity cleanly — no new lender — is often the math that actually works.
The 401(k) ran out. The house didn't. A reverse mortgage adds a compounding liability on your estate; a sale-leaseback converts the equity to cash today and puts you on a clean lease.
One party wants to stay in the house. The other wants their share of the equity, today. Sale-leaseback unwinds the ownership without forcing a move — and without borrowing against the house to do it.
Your tax return looks ugly on paper. Your house is worth what it's worth anyway. This is an asset transaction, not a debt underwriting — no W-2, no DTI calculation, no 7-year ding on your credit.
Kids are finishing school. A job move is 18 months away. You want the equity now and a defined runway in the house. A multi-year lease buys you exactly that.
Anybody who tells you a sale-leaseback is right for everybody is selling something. Here are the four situations where we'd rather you pick a different door — and we'd rather lose the lead than lose your trust.
You want to pass the house down to your kids. You won't own it anymore. That's the whole trade. A reverse mortgage or a HELOC keeps title in the family. This one doesn't.
You plan to move within 2 years anyway. The closing costs and fees on the sale eat the benefit. If you're selling anyway, just sell. Pocket the whole check.
You qualify for a regular mortgage refi at a rate below 6%. Take the cheaper option. Sale-leaseback is built for people the bank said no to — not for people the bank said yes to.
You don't actually need the equity. Don't sell an asset you don't need to sell. A house that's paid off, producing zero financial stress, is one of the rarest things in America. Don't hand it away because a website told you to.
If none of those ruled you out, keep reading. If one of them did, we're glad we told you.
If you need cash and you own a house, you have five real options. Here's the one-card summary of each — the full side-by-side lives on the comparator page.
For the equity-rich, credit-tired, time-short homeowner who wants cash without signing another loan agreement.
Cheap when rates are low and your credit is clean. A second lien on your house and a new monthly bill when they're not.
Works for 62+ homeowners who want to age in place and don't mind the balance compounding against the estate.
The cleanest financial answer. Also the one where you have to find a new place to live, often in the same neighborhood you've been priced out of.
A sale-leaseback is a legitimate real estate instrument. That doesn't mean every provider runs it cleanly, and it doesn't mean every contract is signable. Here are the five failure modes we've seen in the wild — and what a clean deal looks like instead.
A lease with an uncapped annual rent increase is a time bomb. The first year looks fine. Year three you can't afford to stay. A clean contract caps escalations at a defined rate — ideally tied to CPI with a ceiling.
Single-buyer operators set the price with no competing bid. If you've only talked to one provider, you have a number, not a market. Get two independent valuations before you agree to anything.
You're a tenant now. State landlord-tenant law applies. A good contract layers extra protections on top of state law — cure periods, notice requirements, right to stay for a minimum term.
Your lease is between you and the current owner. If that owner sells to somebody else, your lease usually transfers — usually. Read the assignment clause. A clean contract guarantees the lease survives any sale for the full original term.
Some programs advertise a buyback option. Great — until you read the formula. A clean buyback is indexed to the original sale price plus a defined premium, not to wherever the market went.
Commercial sale-leasebacks have existed for roughly seventy years. Macy's did it with their flagship stores. General Motors did it with factory floors. In the last two decades, Fortune 500 companies have closed sale-leaseback transactions on billions of dollars of office towers, distribution centers, and headquarters buildings — because CFOs figured out that tying up capital in real estate you occupy is a worse use of that capital than redeploying it into the business.
The structure is the same one you just read about. A corporation sells a building to an investor. It signs a long-term lease on the same building. It keeps operating. It redeploys the proceeds. The only thing it gives up is the line on the balance sheet that said "we own this." In exchange it gets cash, operational continuity, and a clean tax treatment of the rent as an expense.
The residential version is younger and messier, and it's where the reputation problem starts. When EasyKnock grew into the category leader in the 2010s, the contracts were opaque, the fees were hidden, and the lease protections were thin. Massachusetts settled with them for $200,000 in 2023. Senator Warren opened an inquiry in 2024. By December of that year, they were done — active customers mid-lease when the company shut down.
"Fortune 500 CFOs have been running this play for seventy years. The house you live in should get the same benefit of the doubt — and the same quality of contract."
The lesson isn't that sale-leaseback is broken. The lesson is that a financial instrument that works fine for a billion-dollar office tower needs independent editorial coverage when it shows up on your kitchen table. That's why this site exists.
Yes. That's the trade. You get cash at closing, you keep occupancy on a lease, and you don't keep title. If retaining title matters more to you than cashing out the equity, this is not your tool — look at a HELOC or a reverse mortgage instead.
Depends on the lease you sign. Industry standard is a 1- to 5-year initial term with defined renewal options. A well-structured lease gives you the right to extend at a capped rent. A poorly structured one doesn't. This is one of the two or three clauses worth paying a lawyer to read.
Sale-leaseback is a legitimate real estate instrument used by Fortune 500 companies and institutional real estate investors every week. The residential version is newer and has produced some scammy operators — EasyKnock being the most visible example. That's why independent editorial comparison exists.
The two real costs are the spread between market value and the offer price, and the rent you pay going forward. Typical all-in cost of the sale side runs 6–12% of home value, similar to selling with a real estate agent. The rent side is where a multi-year lease starts to differ from a HELOC or a refi.
Some programs offer a buyback option. Many don't. Of the ones that do, the formula matters more than the existence of the option. If buying the house back is important to you, get the buyback clause in writing up front and run the numbers against realistic appreciation scenarios.
You face eviction, the same way any tenant faces eviction. State landlord-tenant law applies, including cure periods and notice requirements. The consequence of default is different from a mortgage default (no foreclosure on your credit) but it's not zero.
The sale of the house is a real estate transaction and is reported to public records. The lease itself isn't reported to credit bureaus unless you default. For homeowners trying to keep their credit report clean, the sale-leaseback footprint is often smaller than a HELOC.
Thirty days is typical. Some providers can close faster if the title is clean and the buyer is pre-funded. This is the fastest way to convert equity into cash that doesn't involve selling and moving.
You read the whole thing. Here's what comes next.
If you already know this is the right tool, the quiz matches you to a provider that covers your state with a lease you can read without a lawyer. If you're still weighing it, the comparator ranks every operator on the same six criteria and shows the receipts.