Home Equity Investment Companies Compared: 143 CFPB Complaints

What this page compares, and what it leaves to the law page

A home equity investment (HEI), also called a home equity agreement or sharing agreement, pays a homeowner cash today for a share of the home's future value, with no monthly payment. Our home equity investment contracts page covers the CFPB's January 2025 market report, the state laws (Maryland, Connecticut, Maine, Illinois) and the court cases. This page is for the next step: you have decided to look at HEI and want to choose between companies. Our Hometap review goes deep on one of them.

We built two tables nobody else publishes. The first counts every complaint in the CFPB's database for each company, over the same window. The second puts each company's own published contract terms side by side. Then we run the same $100,000 payout on the same $600,000 home through each published formula. The companies are the four the CFPB names as the market leaders (Unison, Point, Hometap, Unlock), plus Splitero and Noah, which appear in the complaint database. Aspire, another name in the CFPB report, does not appear in the database under its own name, and Redwood Trust told the SEC it stopped originating Aspire contracts in the second quarter of 2026 (see the law page).

Table 1: CFPB complaints by company

The CFPB's Consumer Complaint Database is public. For each company we searched by the exact name the CFPB lists, pulled every record, and counted by year, issue, company response and tag. The window is every complaint from the company's first record through November 1, 2026, the latest date in the database when we pulled it (November 11, 2026, 20:20 UTC). The query is https://www.consumerfinance.gov/data-research/consumer-complaints/search/api/v1/?company=<name>. The CFPB files HEI complaints under “Mortgage”, mostly as “Other type of mortgage” or HELOC: 128 of the 143 are filed under Mortgage, and the rest are credit-reporting or loan complaints that name the company.

CFPB complaints by company (pulled November 11, 2026)

Four limits apply. Complaints are not rates: the database has no count of contracts per company, so Point's 58 does not mean it is a worse company than Splitero, whose 6 only start in March 2026. Consumers choose whether to file. The records we pulled carried no narrative text, so we quote none. And a few complaints concern credit reports or inquiries rather than the contract itself.

What the table does show is the pattern. Complaints rose at Hometap (1 in 2024, 17 in 2025), Point (22 in 2026 to November 1 against 11 in all of 2025) and Unlock (3, 10, 16). At the three companies with the most complaints, the top three issues are the application, the payment process and the closing, which is where a homeowner finds out what the contract costs. Point leads on the closing-disclosure sub-issue (8) and on “Negative impact of inaccurate appraisal” (4); Hometap leads on “Confusing or misleading advertising or marketing” (6). The Older American tag, which the CFPB adds when the consumer says so, appears on 14 of Point's complaints, 9 of Hometap's, 6 of Unison's and 5 of Unlock's.

Responses were uniform: almost every complaint was closed with an explanation. Relief is rare: Point recorded one closed with monetary relief, and Hometap two, Unlock one and Unison one with non-monetary relief. Point's public responses are the most defensive: of its 58 complaints, 23 carry “Company believes it acted appropriately as authorized by contract or law” and 10 “Company disputes the facts presented in the complaint”; Unison's 15 carry 5 and 7 of those two. Hometap chose not to give a public response in 29 of 35.

Table 2: published contract terms

Each row is the company's own page, read for this page (Hometap's from our Hometap page, which recorded its FAQ capture of October 3, 2026, its pricing page of June 18, 2026 and its press release of June 16, 2026). These are company claims, not contract text. Where a page does not say, we write so rather than fill the gap.

Published terms by company, as of November 2026

Three differences matter more than the rest. The term: Hometap and Unlock give up to 10 years, Point and Unison 30, and Splitero ties the term to the senior mortgage. A 30-year term is not a long runway but a long exposure. The cap: Hometap's and Splitero's compound monthly, and Unlock's Product Guide formula compounds yearly, payment x (1 + 19.9%) ^ (days / 365), although its FAQ calls the cap “non-compounding”. Read as a straight line instead, Unlock's cap would hold the year-10 bill at $299,000 rather than $322,353 at 6% growth (our arithmetic); ask Unlock which reading your contract uses. And disclosure: Point and Unison publish an example, not a formula. Point's own example shows the part the CFPB warned about: a risk-adjusted value of $365,000 for a $500,000 home, so growth is measured from a number below the appraisal (the page describes a 29% risk adjustment). We cannot compute year 10 for either company from its pages.

Point's published example is a $50,000 payment on a $500,000 home, settled in year 5: the homeowner repays $110,500 if the home sells for $593,800 (3.5% a year), $125,700 if it sells for $653,500 (5.5% a year, where the page says a “time-based, max amount” applies) and $51,800 if it sells for $362,100. On licensing, Point lists its HEI as a licensed mortgage product in Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, North Carolina, Oregon, Washington and Wisconsin and says that in California its HEI is not offered under its California Financing Law license; it adds that HEIs in other states “are not currently required to be licensed.”

Regulators and courts, company by company

Regulator actions and court cases found in the sources we read

All of these are described on our law page, which links the primary documents. Allegations and a withdrawn brief are not findings. The Colorado settlement is the only outcome in the table, and it applied credit rules to one company.

The same $100,000 on the same home, through each formula

We take a $600,000 home and a $100,000 payment, 16.7% of value, a size inside every company's range. Each company's published settlement rule is applied as written: Hometap's 1.65x (within 5 years) or 1.80x (after year 5) times 16.7% of value, against the cap of $100,000 compounded at 18.5% a year monthly; Unlock's ratio of 1.8 (its published example turns 10% into 18%) times 16.7%, against $100,000 times (1 plus 0.199 times the years); Splitero's ratio of 2.0 (its published 10% for 20% example) against $100,000 compounded at 17.99% monthly. The owed amount is the lesser of the two. The ratios for Unlock and Splitero come from their sample pages, not from a contract: a real offer can differ. Net cash is the payout less the processing fee (4.5%, 4.9% and 4.99%), and the annualized cost is the owed amount over net cash to the power of 1 over the years, minus 1; third-party costs are left out. Point and Unison are excluded because their pages publish no formula. All of it is our arithmetic.

Amount owed on a $100,000 payout, $600,000 home (our arithmetic)

Home value at year 3 is $600,000, $655,636 or $714,610 and at year 10 $600,000, $806,350 or $1,074,509; at year 30 Splitero's rows use $600,000, $1,456,357 and $3,446,095. “(cap)” marks a row where the cap is lower than the percentage share.

Read down the columns. In year 3, a flat home costs $165,000 at Hometap (20.0% a year on the $95,500 net cash), $172,368 at Unlock (21.9%) and $170,863 at Splitero (21.6%): at 3% growth all three caps bind, so the price of leaving early is the cap, not the home. In year 10 the three are within 11% of each other for a flat home ($180,000 to $200,000) and $35,817 apart at 6% growth ($322,353 at Hometap and Unlock, $358,170 at Splitero). Splitero is the cheapest of the three in year 3 for a home that grows; Hometap and Unlock are identical in year 10 at every growth rate ($180,000, $241,905 and $322,353) because both resolve to 30% of the home's value and neither cap binds. If Unlock's cap were read as a straight line, as its FAQ wording suggests, Unlock would owe $159,700 in year 3 and $299,000 in year 10 at 6% growth (our arithmetic). At 30 years Splitero would owe $200,000 to $1,148,698 on its 33.3% share, a 2.5% to 8.7% yearly cost on the cash received, because its compounding cap is nowhere near binding.

Hometap and Splitero year-by-year detail (our arithmetic)

A HELOC for comparison needs a rate we can cite. Our Figure HELOC review reads 2025 HMDA median rates of 7.50% and 9.10%; an interest-only $100,000 at those rates costs $7,500 and $9,100 a year, or $75,000 and $91,000 over 10 years, plus the $100,000 principal. For a borrower 62 or older, the HECM reverse mortgage page shows the federal alternative.

What a reader can do with this

1. Ask each company for the dollar payoff at your home value and three growth rates, and the cap in writing. Our tables show the cap can decide the price in years 1 to 5, and that “compounded monthly” and “non-compounding” are far apart after year 7.
2. Ask Point and Unison for the formula. Their pages publish an example, not the multiplier, the starting-value discount or the cap. Without them you cannot compare either to the others.
3. Check the complaint file for your company and the issue you fear. The CFPB database is free to search; the application, the payment process and the closing disclosure are where complaints cluster at the three largest.
4. Check your state and the licence. The company's NMLS number is searchable on NMLS Consumer Access; Point says HEI is a licensed product in nine states, Colorado's settlement requires Unlock to obtain Colorado licenses before resuming operations, and Massachusetts is outside Hometap's state list.
5. Price the alternatives with a rate you can cite: a HELOC, a cash-out refinance, and a HECM if you are 62 or older.

More on home equity contracts, read from the same kind of primary records: Splitero, Point, Unlock, Unison, Hometap and Truehold (sale-leaseback).

FAQ

This is analysis of public documents, not investment, legal or tax advice. Sources: CFPB Consumer Complaint Database API, queried by company name on November 11, 2026 (20:20 UTC); company pages: point.com HEI and licenses pages, unlock.com FAQ and What It Costs pages, splitero.com pricing page, unison.com home page (captured October 1, 2026), Hometap pages as recorded in our Hometap review; our home equity investment contracts page for the Colorado, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Ninth Circuit cases. Costs are our arithmetic on published terms and are not a quote.