Home Equity Investment Calculator: Your HEI or HEA’s True APR Cost

The guide below explains how HEIs work, how to work out what they’ll actually cost you, and how to use our home equity investment calculator to compare them against a HELOC or home equity loan. If your provider calls the product a home equity agreement, the same tool works as an HEA calculator, because they are the same product.

Home equity investments are gaining ground as an alternative to traditional borrowing, but they work differently than any loan you’ve taken before. There’s no monthly payment. No interest rate on your statement. No lender in the traditional sense. That makes them useful for some homeowners and expensive for others, and the difference comes down to a number that isn’t printed on the agreement: the effective annual rate.

A home equity investment (HEI) is a transaction where a company gives you a lump sum of cash today in exchange for a share of your home’s future value. You don’t make monthly payments. Instead, you settle the balance, typically in 10 to 30 years, when you sell, refinance, or the agreement term ends.
Two structures are common:
Appreciation share. The company takes a percentage of the increase in your home’s value above a set starting point. If your home doesn’t appreciate much, their payout is small. If it appreciates a lot, their share grows with it.
Total value share. The company takes a percentage of your home’s total future value, not just the appreciation. This tends to produce a larger payout to the investor no matter how much appreciation occurs.
Either way, you’re giving up a piece of what your home becomes worth instead of paying interest month to month. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau reviewed these products in a January 2025 report and noted two things worth knowing before you sign: the settlement amount is usually much larger than the upfront payment, and disclosures aren’t standardized across providers, so comparing offers takes work.

The industry hasn’t settled on a single name for this product. Point and Hometap call it a home equity investment (HEI). Unlock calls it a home equity agreement (HEA). You’ll also see home equity sharing agreement, shared equity agreement, and the CFPB’s preferred term, home equity contract. The labels differ, but the structure is the same: cash today for a share of your home’s value tomorrow. That means you can use the calculator on this page as an HEI calculator or an HEA calculator interchangeably. Whatever your provider calls the deal, the inputs and the math don’t change.

Because there’s no stated interest rate, HEIs are hard to compare to a HELOC or home equity loan on paper. The fix is to work out the effective annual percentage rate (APR), the same metric lenders are required to disclose on traditional products.
An HEI is a single advance settled in a single payment. You received cash today (the net proceeds after fees), and you’ll hand back a lump sum at the end (the balloon payment). The effective APR is the annual rate that connects those two numbers, calculated the way Regulation Z treats single-payment transactions. It is an economic comparison rather than a Truth in Lending disclosure: providers do not treat these agreements as credit, and this figure is not one they are required to publish.
Here’s how it works for an appreciation-share HEI:

For a total-value-share HEI, the balloon payment is simply the company’s share percentage applied to the full future home value.

Say you take a $50,000 HEI on a $500,000 home. Origination and third-party costs come to about $4,000, the provider takes a 25% share of appreciation, and it measures that appreciation from a starting value of $375,000, which is 75% of today’s value. The term runs 10 years. Your net proceeds are $46,000. Here’s what the deal costs at three appreciation rates:

Same deal, three very different costs. Two inputs drive most of that spread: the share percentage and the starting value the provider measures growth from. A starting value set well below today’s appraisal means the provider’s share begins accruing before your home has gained anything, so it’s worth finding that figure in your own paperwork rather than assuming a default.

Most providers cap what they can collect, and the cap materially changes the cost. A payout cap limits the settlement to a multiple of the investment; an annualized cost cap limits the implied annual rate. Published caps currently run from about 12% in the early years at the low end to roughly 18% to 20% elsewhere. On the example above, a 2.0x payout cap brings the effective APR down from 12.3% to about 8.1%, and holds it there however fast the home appreciates. If your offer includes a cap, enter it in the calculator, because leaving it out overstates what you’d pay in a strong market.

Our HEI calculator runs this math for you and lets you adjust the assumptions to see how the cost changes.
Start with your deal terms. Enter the investment amount, your current home value, and the origination fees your provider quoted. Published fees currently run about 3.9% to 5% of the investment, plus third-party costs such as appraisal, title, and escrow. They reduce your net proceeds and raise your effective APR, so include them.
Choose your product type. Use the toggle to switch between appreciation share and total value share. The inputs change slightly. For appreciation share, you’ll also enter the appreciation starting value, the base from which the company measures your home’s growth. This number is set by the provider, not you. Published risk adjustments range from about 5% to nearly 30% below the appraised value, so take the figure from your own agreement.
Enter any caps. If your offer includes a payout cap or an annualized cost cap, add it. The calculator applies whichever produces the lower settlement.
Adjust the appreciation rate. This is where you stress-test the deal. Try 3%, 4.3%, and 6% to see how the APR shifts. Markets vary a lot, and if your local market has been running hotter, an appreciation-share deal will cost you more than the average scenario suggests.
Read the results. The calculator shows your effective APR, the estimated balloon payment you’d owe at settlement, and a breakdown of the investor’s projected payout versus your future home value. The APR is the most useful number for comparison purposes.

Once you have your HEI’s effective APR, expand the comparison panel in the calculator and enter the terms of a HELOC or home equity loan offer. The comparison shows monthly payment and total interest for the same amount, giving you a side-by-side view.
Here’s how the three options stack up in practice.
Home equity investment. No monthly payment during the term, and qualification typically doesn’t depend on income documentation or a high credit score. The cost is uncertain because it’s tied to how much your home appreciates, and the effective APR can range from competitive to expensive. You can compare providers side by side on our home equity investment listings, where you’ll find community reviews and terms for companies like Point, Unison, and Hometap.
HELOC. Variable rate, draw what you need. Monthly payments are required during the draw and repayment periods. Predictable when rates are stable, less so when they move. Typically the lower total cost in flat-appreciation markets. Current offers are on our HELOC listings.
Home equity loan. Fixed rate, lump sum, consistent monthly payments throughout the term. Easier to budget around, and total interest is knowable upfront. Often the lowest-cost option when rates are reasonable. See rates on our home equity loan listings.

The calculator gives you a financial comparison, not a recommendation about your situation. A few factors matter beyond the numbers.
How long you’ll stay in the home. HEIs are designed for longer terms. If you sell before the agreement ends, you settle then, and short-term home appreciation can be volatile. A 10-year HEI in a market that sees a 15% run in the first three years means a much higher effective APR than the 10-year projection showed. Regulators looking at settled contracts have found most homeowners exit far earlier than the full term, which raises the effective cost.
What happens to your equity over time. If your home appreciates significantly, a large share goes to the investor at settlement. That can limit your ability to use the equity for other goals, whether that’s a move, retirement, or passing wealth to heirs.
The value of no monthly payment. The effective APR already credits the fact that you pay nothing until the end, which is why an HEI’s APR is far lower than the same settlement would look on an amortizing loan. What it can’t price is what that cash-flow relief is worth to you specifically, or the value of qualifying at all if a traditional lender would turn you down.

Functionally, yes. HEA is the term Unlock uses; Point and Hometap say HEI, and the CFPB calls them home equity contracts. All describe the same arrangement: a lump sum today in exchange for a share of your home’s future value, settled when you sell, refinance, or the term ends. Enter your terms the same way whichever name your provider uses, switching the product-type toggle if your agreement takes a share of total home value rather than appreciation.

Start with 4.3%, which is roughly where the two main national house price indexes land over the past 35 years, then test 3% and 6% to see the range. Shorter windows differ a lot, and recent forecasts for the next few years are lower. If homes in your metro have been appreciating faster than the national average, lean toward the higher scenario when judging the deal.

It’s as accurate as your inputs. The deal terms (amount, fees, share, starting value, term, and any caps) are fixed by your contract, so the real unknowns are what your home will be worth at settlement and when you’ll actually settle. That’s why stress-testing several appreciation rates and holding periods matters more than any single result.

No. Providers generally don’t treat these agreements as credit, so there’s no Truth in Lending APR on the paperwork. This figure is an economic comparison, calculated the way Regulation Z annualizes a single-payment transaction, so you can put the deal on the same footing as a HELOC or home equity loan. Several states have begun requiring providers to disclose an annualized cost directly.