Landa-app update Part 2 losing money.

 

I think the graph speaks for itself. I have had Landa.app for a few years now, and I can confirm that this company is a great way to lose money. Yishai Cohen used the tagline "Real estate investment for real people" to help bring in investments into this company. As most of you know, I was excited but a bit skeptical about Landa.app, and it appears that time has now proved what I long suspected: the only people who will make long-term money on Landa.app are the company itself. Let's break this down and go over what I am personally experiencing.

1. The Dividends

The idea was that by owning a share of the properties, any income generated from the property would be distributed via monthly dividends to the investors. In April of 2022, I purchased my initial six properties, and just like any good scam, the initial months that followed had me excited to see the potential growth from my investment. I utilized a reinvestment strategy and grew my account, despite seeing the cracks forming in the Landa.app foundation, until finally it started to collapse completely.

  

That's right, folks; despite having more shares than the overall value, the dividends are going downhill. Like so many others, I started to wonder why a company with such a good idea could go so wrong. Real estate is supposed to be one of the best investments, but in my portfolio, it's turning out to be one of the worst. The question is: why?T

2. The Landa.app Management Style

I started looking into each of the properties I had purchased and realized there was a common problem: Landa.app is the company that manages them. The CEO of Landa is Yishai Cohen. If you look at his Facebook profile, you will see he is politically active when it comes to the Palestine/Israel conflict.

If Yishai Cohen were to focus more on his company and less on what's happening in Israel, there is a good chance that Landa might be able to make good on the company slogan. The point is, good management starts at the top and works its way down. So at the property level, it was no surprise to see items that I would consider mismanagement. Now, keep in mind that Landa.app is the management company; that means that they get paid no matter what. So no matter how bad they are at managing properties, they will get their money before any of the investors. This is key because, unlike other situations where if a property management company is doing poorly, they can be let go and replaced with a more competent management firm, this is not the case with Landa.app. They have created a product that will generate income for the corporation and ultimately leave the shareholders holding the bag when it fails. After looking into this a bit more, I now realize why some commenters on other posts referred to the upper management of Landa.app as snake oil salesmen.

Let's take one of my properties and take a look at it to see what I am referring to.

3. Analysis

For this exercise, we will use 6696 Mableton Parkway SE, but most of the others all follow a similar pattern. First and foremost, Landa.app is not great at providing information on the financial portion of how a property is doing. As an example, you can see from the following screenshots that there are items marked as missing. This is concerning because it has to do with money, and when information about financial items is missing, it leads one to wonder if there is some illegal activity happening. Per this graph, after March of 2024, things begin to start getting questionable.

For those of you who are wondering, yes, I have reached out to Landa in the past about information being incorrect, but they just keep responding with the same line that they will escalate it, but nothing seems to change, so I have quit trying. As I dig a bit more into this property, I noticed an extra loan that was taken out on the property. This is a fairly significant amount for a property that was turning a small profit but now has a liability.

Here is Octobers Dividend information. Notice the change in cash going negative. 

Notice that Landa still gets paid even with the property turning negative and the property management fee in July is well over 200.  

As you can see from Landa.app's own website, there is no explanation of what has happened with the amount of money taken out via the loan in July. The loan amount shows $390,625.00, but the cash balance is only listed at $32,225.83. My question is: what happened with the $358,399.00? The negative amount is only about -$500 a month, and it's only been four months since the loan was taken, according to the documents provided. Where's the money, Landa.app?

    

 

Navigating a Year with Landa-App: Unmasking the Realities – Part 1: My Growth Journey

introduction: Embarking on the Landa-app adventure has been a rollercoaster of excitement, curiosity, and the occasional perplexity. Today, I'm peeling back the curtain on my 12-month journey, aiming to share the unfiltered experience of being a Landa-app investor. In this first installment, let's dive deep into the world of growth, where numbers tell a story beyond the glossy PR releases.

My Growth Tale: Why do we invest in Landa-app? For me, it's all about building a portfolio for long-term gains, primarily focused on generating passive income. The first-year return on my investment was a decent 11.14%. Sounds good, right? Well, here's where the plot thickens.

Diversification Reality: To play it safe, I diversified my portfolio across 15 different Landa properties. Yet, despite this spread, a red flag waved – a significant 40% drop in monthly dividends. The glossy Landa-app charts, presented as a reliable performance guide, didn't quite add up. Enter my savior: my meticulously maintained separate record, a personal playbook offering a more genuine look at how my investments were faring.

Inconsistencies Unveiled: As I delved deeper, I discovered a disconcerting misalignment between Landa-app's charts and the raw numbers. Take December's apparent uptick in dividends – misleading. The reality? Less than what I pocketed in November. This revelation underscored the need to keep my own tabs on the data, ensuring an authentic gauge of my investment's heartbeat.

Anticipating the Future: 

As this chapter of my Landa-app journey concludes, I find myself peering into the crystal ball of anticipation. What's on the horizon? While the initial year boasted an 11.14% return, I'm cautiously projecting a more conservative 5 to 6% for the upcoming year. The allure of growth remains, but with a tempered expectation based on the challenges encountered. As the narrative unfolds in subsequent posts, I'll unravel the intricacies of Landa-app's functionality, its user interface, and the crucial role played by customer support. Buckle up for more personal revelations and a candid look into the dynamics of real estate investment with Landa-app. The journey continues, and so does the tale. investment. 

Landa.app fantasy Lend profits.

Is Landa.app new Debt (or Lend) program worth investing in?  This product came out a few months ago. I first found out about it in May and decided to give it a try based on the Landa.app site was showing. Now let me start off by sharing that I was well aware Landa intended to do what they do best and that is ensure they get paid before anyone else.  Here I took a little screenshot from the website today that shows how they are trying to frame this product. you can clearly see the interest rate shows 7.05%  but if you do the math using what is displayed for the May Dividend and the total used you will see that the return rate via dividend would be 5.4%.

This wouldn't be a bad return, but it is definitely not what I received. I had purchased 10 shares of Landa debt product (so it was an even $100.00)  in May when the product first came out. I understood that it would take a bit of time to fund the first loan so I wasn't too worried, but some of the numbers are just not adding up.  In July Landa gave me a 0.31 cent dividend for what I assume is the Landa debt product. 

This is an example of what Landa gave me to show the payment. It's very generic.  Keep in mind that is .31 for my 10 shares of the product. If we do the math on this and the return stays consistent at .31 the investment would net me a grand total of 3.72% over the course of a 1 year period.   This is of course a risky investment with no insurance to protect my capital investment.  Just in case anyone is wondering redneck bank has a money-market account that will pay 5%, and it's insured. 

I am hopeful that this item will get better, and it's only rough because of the initial offering. I will post updates as I progress.   

Eating Landa.app Crow

    I have now been a landa.app user for over a year.  When Landa first came out it was very rough, with a lot of glitches. I still do not like the fact that some properties seem to be difficult to purchase. I also do not like the fact that if you want to see the properties or buy properties on the Landa.app secondary market you have to pay a commission for each share.  Landa says that they do not make any additional profit from the sales, but I would be willing to bet if I dug deep enough I would find the same owner running the secondary marketplace that runs Landa.app.  With that being said, I have now been with Landa for over a year, and my initial 2K investment, has netted me a nice estimated $250.00 return. I have not sat down to do the exact numbers yet but from the quick eyeball test, this appears to be a better than 10% return on my investment. The other item that I am excited about is Landa.app now has a web portal, to access information.  This makes copying information about each transaction much easier. I did notice that the website has properties listed on it that were not listed on the app. Obviously Landa.app is still having some growing pains, but it appears that the possibility of generating passive income from this app to aid in the retirement years is becoming a reality.  This month I only experienced 1 problem when purchasing a property, and support was able to get it resolved quickly. I am currently taking the passive income and re-investing it into some of the new properties, so this next year I should see some growth. I will provide additional updates.  Post questions in the comment section. 

Landa a dividend delight.

 December 9th 2022

I am here to provide my Nov/Dec Landa update. This month the dividends were nice but as always there has been a problem. Before I get into the issues encountered this month let's take a look at what my dividends provided for me this month. As I have stated in the past my goal is to obtain a 10% return on the passive portion of my investment, this means that if the property itself goes up in value, I do not take that into account since my goal is passive monthly income.  This month my total return against my initial investment was 1.1%. I know that this percentage will naturally go down, due to the way Landa pays out dividends on its properties that are not 100% sold.  So let's just pretend for a moment, that everyone paid the rent on time, and Landa was able to move forward and continue paying me the rent dividend every month. This would yield a return of 13.2% EOY return total.  Considering that the best CD rate I can find today is 5.35% taking a risk for me is worth it. One thing to keep in mind however is that the current property set that Landa is offering will not pay out the types of returns I am seeing. The best one I could find this month to re-invest in would only yield a little over 4% for the year. This means that am still trying to decide if I want to re-invest the dividends here or move them to another location for growth. Now let's move on to the ever-present elephant in the room with Landa. The fact that I have encountered more issues Yet again this month. Landa collects rent in advance and pays out the dividends on the first of every month. I have in the past had issues with the amount listed in my payout being different than the final total. After learning this lesson the hard way I have opted to wait for all funds to clear out of processing before doing anything. Well unfortunately this month it appears that according to the App my funds are still processing 9 days later. That’s right it's December 9th and nothing has cleared. I reached out to Land's awesome support team, only to be told that everything looks good on their end.

Yes, I have been waiting now for 9 days because the app will not show my dividend as being processed. I would like to say this is a surprise, but as the previous blogs post-show it's kind of normal.

I think the worst part was, in an attempt to see if it happened to be my device that was causing an issue, I logged out of Landa, closed the app down, and then logged back in. I figured this would clear any potential bad information, and I wasn't wrong. It cleared my history back to Oct.  That's right, had I not taken any screenshots of my Landa Information I would have no record showing what properties paid me a dividend this month. This goes back to my continuing question of how legitimate is Landa? Why would it not allow offline downloads of information for its clients?  As of the writing of this blog post, I still have not been able to refresh the app to get my most current transaction, so my hope is that the techs are working on it. If something really odd happens I will post a supplement blog for this month to share my experience.  As always if you have any questions, or comments post them, and I will do my best to answer.

Landa app shell game

November 16-2022      

    I have been using Landa now for multiple months and have grave concerns with the way it conducts business. I am starting to feel that Landa has some very serious issues with how this company is run.  I have come to the realization that the company's intention is not to sell properties to everyone but instead wants to boost its membership base numbers. You might ask why would a company do something like this, and the answer is simple. Landa is attempting to prove that it is a legitimate company through the use of membership numbers.  After all, how could a company with dividends distributed to over 30,000 members be bad? 

    Let's start off with the process of buying properties. As I have already demonstrated in other posts, Landa has been limiting my purchasing of properties that would have a higher return rate. There have been times when the limit was very straightforward, and it was obvious they did not want me to purchase additional shares. I am going to provide an example of straightforward property denial in a screenshot from the app below. 

 As you can see from the text, this property appears reserved within the property pool to act as bait to draw in additional subscribers. This is a key to my point that Landa's goal appears not to be selling properties but acquiring additional users of their app.  This one is a very straightforward way of preventing people from purchasing properties but, I have experienced multiple other ways of preventing me from acquiring properties with a more subtle approach. 

Take for example my recent attempt to purchase 2 shares of a property whose rent payments would provide roughly a 5% dividend rate (as opposed to the 1% rate of the other available options). I was informed by Landa that my previous month's dividends were ready to re-invest so I moved forward with this purchase.  I attempted to get 2 shares, and as you can clearly see the site is showing that there are 1762 shares available.  This failed, so I reached out to Landa support and received a response that I think are just a canned response.

As you can see I had the cash in my account and attempted to purchase a property. Landa simply blocked it and pretended that it was a software glitch. You can clearly see there were plenty of available shares, but the purchase did not go through. I have multiple other instances of other purchases that had similar results, where a technical glitch prevented me from obtaining the property that I was attempting to purchase. Some of the other screenshots I have contained sensitive information so I can not include them here, but I can provide a small example showing where one of my purchases indicated that the funds had been sent, yet I never did receive the property. I ultimately had to cancel the transaction after trying to run the clock out. 

Once I finally gave up on purchasing additional properties, I decided it was time to just pull the dividends out of Landa, and start looking for other places to keep my returns. This is where things got very scary. Landa had another Glitch that prevented my withdrawal request from going through. That's right, I could not pull the funds that I had made via the dividend out into my bank account. I reached out to support, and it dragged on for about a week before I was asked to cancel the transaction as part of the bug that they found. 

I did cancel the withdrawal, and the amount that ended up in my account was -.20 less than the amount shown in the account prior to the withdrawal attempt.  This prompted me to run through all of my Landa transactions, and as of this wrighting, my total vs Landa total is .09 different.  This is eye-opening because it tells me 2 things. The first takeaway is Landa app accounting is not to be trusted. The numbers that they provide are not correct, so keeping a separate personal Ledger is highly important.  The second key is, the software is full of bugs. Landa does not provide any type of useable ledger, that you can download and validate against personal records, and I suspect that this is by design.  Consider this, if something were to go south, and Landa ended up in court the lack of transparency would help them. 

Let me finish this post, by sharing my personal thoughts on Landa. Regardless of the trouble, Landa has with their application and my fear that ultimately the company will end up disappearing I plan on continuing investing and growing my Landa profile. Some of you may ask why would I do that and I can only share a line that a good friend of mine uses "Sometimes you have to risk it for the Biscuit". My goal has always been passive income, and there is high risk with investments that provide over a 10% return. I am willing to take that risk in hopes that I am wrong and Landa is around for a long time.  I will be creating a separate post that will share the gains or losses I have made with Landa as a way of sharing with the community. My goal is simple, and that is to generate passive income, and at the moment Landa is enabling me to do this. 

Making money with Landa

November 1 2022 update

 I realize I have been a bit critical of Landa, and I still am unsure if it will truly be a long-term income generator. I do however have to eat crow because it is turning out a monthly dividend on the income I have invested.  I started my Landa account as more of a way to test the waters in something other than the stock market.  My personal goal when investing is to obtain a 10% return year over year, and if the previous month's results are an indication of how Landa will perform moving forward then I do hope they come out with some more properties that pay out a better dividend than the current one's listed. Landa recently announced that they have become a broker "https://stories.landa.app/new-302d2c8bed0e". This is important because it might affect how much properties cost to obtain. The question I have is will Landa use this new status to help pad their pockets, or pass the savings on to the investors who are enabling them to grow their real estate management portfolio?  I think it is still too early to have a definitive answer, but hopefully cutting some costs such as these will enable Landa to obtain some more properties that can provide a good 10% return to the investors, why they enjoy their 9% management fees. This would truly be a win-win for everyone.  If you have any questions add a comment and I will do my best to answer them.