The furniture did not have to move. That was EasyKnock’s neatest trick. A homeowner could sell the house, receive cash and go to sleep in the same bedroom. Outside, nothing announced the transaction. Inside the paperwork, however, something substantial had happened: the person who owned the home had become its tenant.
- EasyKnock bought homes and rented them back to their former owners.
- Sell & Stay addressed cash needs; MoveAbility addressed the awkward interval between homes.
- The company closed in December 2024. Existing housing arrangements continued beyond it.
There is a reason this proposition found an audience. A house can make someone wealthy on a spreadsheet and leave them unable to pay a bill. Selling releases the money, but ordinarily introduces another problem: where to live. EasyKnock tried to separate those events. Its history is a useful study in how much a financial product can change while the customer’s surroundings remain perfectly familiar.
A house is a peculiar savings account
Jarred Kessler and Benjamin Black founded EasyKnock in 2016. Kessler brought a financial-services background, including work at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse. The problem was recognisable: equity accumulated in residential property was not necessarily accessible to the person living there. A bank’s answer depended on underwriting, income and credit. Ownership alone did not settle the matter.
EasyKnock’s answer was to become the buyer. Sell & Stay converted the property into cash and a rental arrangement, with contractual options to repurchase or arrange a later sale. Customers included homeowners who could not qualify for conventional financing. Because EasyKnock structured the transaction as a sale and lease, it approached the problem through real estate acquisition rather than issuing a standard home-equity loan.
The distinction matters. With a HELOC, the customer remains the homeowner and takes on secured debt. With a sale-leaseback, title changes hands. The familiar street address can disguise an unfamiliar relationship: rent replaces the obligations of ownership, and continued residence rests on a lease.
The moving van could wait
MoveAbility, launched in 2019, applied the same mechanism to a different difficulty. Buyers often need proceeds from their present house to purchase the next one. They would prefer to find the next house before emptying the present one. The calendar, rather unhelpfully, refuses to organise itself around that preference.
EasyKnock bought the existing property and let the seller remain as a renter while searching. Launch materials described stays of three to 18 months. Cash from the transaction could support the next down payment. This put the company between conventional bridge financing and an immediate sale followed by a hurried relocation.
Cash is released.
A new lease.
under the contract.
Convenience had a price. Reporting on MoveAbility’s launch described a 1.5% transaction fee and 2% closing fee, plus market-rate rent. An optional agent added a reported 5-6% commission. These are historical launch terms, rather than a price list for every EasyKnock agreement.
3.5% of an assumed $300,000 home value. Rent and any agent commission are additional. This illustration is not a customer quote.
The business collected fees and rent while capital was tied up in homes. Repurchase or a subsequent third-party sale recovered that investment. For customers, the sensible comparison therefore involved the whole period of occupancy and the eventual exit, rather than merely the cheque at closing.
The brokers returned through the front door
EasyKnock’s early messaging makes an amusing companion to its later strategy. A 2017 portal announcement proposed connecting buyers and sellers without brokers. By 2020, MoveAbility for Realtors offered referring agents an upfront 1% commission and a guaranteed six-month exclusive listing. The intermediary had become a distribution partner.
Partnerships with realtor.com and zavvie extended that approach. Realtor.com users could evaluate eligibility and likely proceeds; brokerages using zavvie could offer a sale-leaseback bridge. The useful idea was to meet customers where the timing problem appeared, in conversations with agents and on property platforms.
“We move fast so homeowners don’t have to.”EasyKnock’s historical recruiting copy
Its public language favoured speed and flexibility. Expansion followed: Ribbon, Onder and Balance Homes were acquired in 2023, followed by HomePace in 2024. EasyKnock was assembling more ways to handle home purchases, maintenance and equity access. The ambition had grown beyond a single sell-and-stay transaction.
An option is not the money to exercise it
The trouble appeared before the shutdown. In December 2023, Massachusetts announced a settlement resolving allegations of unfair and deceptive conduct. EasyKnock agreed to stop the covered sale-leaseback transactions in the state, pay $200,000 and change aspects of tenants’ arrangements.
Michigan’s attorney general took action in May 2024. The department alleged that deductions reduced the cash homeowners received and that rising rent and repurchase prices complicated their return to ownership. These were regulator allegations. They also identified the product’s central tension: customers excluded from conventional financing might need that financing later to buy their homes back.
That is the condition under which the promised flexibility becomes difficult to use. Temporary liquidity can help with a temporary timing problem. It cannot, by itself, establish affordable rent or a workable repurchase plan. A contractual right to buy something has limited practical value when the buyer cannot fund the purchase.
The company stopped. The houses did not.
EasyKnock announced a $28 million Series D in February 2024. In December, it closed. NPR reported that customers received notices naming NESE Property Management. The cause of the sudden closure was not explained in those notices. Funding and regulatory pressure belong in the chronology; neither supplies a complete, proven explanation for the decision.
The aftermath continued into June 2026. Michigan announced an agreement establishing an $85,000 settlement fund and reforms for the entities handling its homes. The agreement identified NESE as servicer and EK Real Estate Fund I as the Michigan property owner. Respondents denied wrongdoing and made no admission of liability.
The lesson readers can copy is a question: what must be true at the exit? Ask it of rent increases, remaining proceeds, repurchase financing and the entity responsible for the lease. EasyKnock recognised a real inconvenience and sold a way around it. Its history shows why the end of that route deserves as much attention as the entrance.