Founded in 2019, Landa is a real estate investment-as-a-service platform. CEO Yishai Cohen and former CTO Amit Assaraf are under the gun, with major operational problems and a growing tide of user complaints. The firm’s mission was to democratize real estate investing, enabling users to invest and diversify with as little as $5. Yet, it has allegedly failed to pay dividends, leaving thousands of everyday investors nervous about getting their money back. Even more than 766,000 registered users are in crisis. The platform’s app is offline, and the investment portal has disappeared.
At a critical juncture, conditions spiral out of control. Due to the continued tensions, a court forced Landa to return control of 119 of those properties back to a lender. As investors chime in with concerns, the startup’s inclusive vision of real estate investment through crowdfunding seems further out of reach.
Platform’s Promising Beginnings
Landa was created with the goal of democratizing access to real estate investment. By allowing them to invest with little actual money on the line, it opened the gates for a new kind of investor. The company’s platform includes an app that lets customers purchase and trade shares tied to single-family rental properties. Plus, users can get real-time notifications about what’s going on with their investments.
Once praised for its potential, Landa’s door-to-door business model has quickly been brought to its knees. According to its website, the startup has distributed more than $13 million in dividends and interest already. According to widespread reports, Landa stopped paying dividends to at least one user beginning in January. This decision was the tipping point to increasing frustrations within its user base.
In response to technical issues hampering the platform, Cohen remarked, “It has nothing to do with dividends. It is coming from our servers. We are working on it.”
User Complaints and Operational Issues
Landa is currently under investigation for more than 130 complaints with the Better Business Bureau. Thousands of impacted users are understandably angry as they currently cannot access their funds and have not received any dividend payments. Investors say they’re been hung out to dry for months now as communication has dried up from Landa.
Continuing to have them freeze me out of my funds and then simply disabled the app one day,” said one upset user. To which another replied, “I kept asking them directly and eventually got back evasive replies, no substance.
As of May 23, the investor portal website just sends users to a maddening “come-back-soon” maintenance announcement page. This ambiguity has users on edge about their capital investments.
Rep. Cohen acknowledged the challenges on the platform. In his announcement, he promised investors, “We’re aware of today’s irregularities, and we’re urgently addressing these concerns to get everything back to normal as soon as…continue reading…
Legal Troubles and Leadership Changes
The turbulence within Landa goes deeper than technical woes. A recently-filed court order requires the company to come clean about what it’s doing. This follows their alleged attempts to profit from the sale or refinance of multiple properties without appropriate disclosures. When they lost on the above, the legal challenges skyrocketed. Then it was revealed that Cohen had purportedly instructed tenants to start routing their rent checks to a different bank account, raising even greater concern among creditors.
Amit Assaraf stoked the drama further when he announced his intention to leave Landa in December 2023. This past week, he announced that news via his personal LinkedIn profile. Given the dramatic executive turnover, the leadership shakeup has left many wondering as to the company’s internal stability, even in these stormy waters.
Uh oh—are they going under? “Absolutely not! The site will go back online,” Cohen promised investors. At the time, he seemed supremely confident about the platform’s long-term prospects.
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