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. 

Buying property with Landa is a bit of a Joke.

 Landa App update. October 1, 2022

I have jumped into using the land app with both feet. It has been an interesting experience. I am still not 100% convinced that the whole app isn't going to implode at some point as some giant Ponzi scheme. With that being said Let's take a look at some of the unique situations I have encountered recently. Let's start off with my first thought and that is if you think Landa is going to be some great way to pick up real estate shares that provide a decent return you will be sadly mistaken.  The truth is Landa is set up to allow its users to buy real estate, but unless you get one of the prime properties then the rent dividend that it generates can be less than 3%.  This is important because, with the way interest rates are going, I think that soon we will be able to buy 5-year CDs that will net a 4% a year return. Yes, it's true that CDs are not property, but you don't risk losing your initial investment unless the CD is over the insurance limit. If you have that kind of money to invest, my question is why are you reading this little blog.  With that being said let's do some simple math and look at a Landa property.  I have attempted to purchase a few good deals only to have them shut down by Landa.  Take for instance my attempt to purchase 21 shares of  8652 Ashley.  

As you can see I attempted to purchase 21 shares of this property (at the time the app showed that there were slightly more than 21 available). I opted for this property because its dividend (or rent) was about $0.05 per month. So doing some simple math that would be me $.60 a year for every share that I purchased .(05*12= $.60) assuming that the renter paid the rent every month. This equates to a slightly better than 10% return every year again assuming the renter pays their rent every month.   Well as you can tell from the support person's response I ultimately did not get to purchase the shares at the initial price, and Landa got to hold onto my cash for about a week before they figured out what the software glitch was and fixed it.  Keep in mind that as they fixed said glitch I watched the available shares in this location vanish. If I remember right there were about 200 available when I initially attempted the purchase but by the end of day 2, they were all gone.  The kind rep did offer me a $5.00 gift but that failed as well.  Surely this was a one-time issue, right? What are the chances that I would attempt to purchase another property, and have it slip away due to a technical issue?   I won't bore you with all of the details, but here is another screenshot for you to enjoy. 

  

Unfortunately, I never did get that property, and I also did not get my money back from the purchase. I am not too worried about the cash on this one because it was such a small amount, and Landa has been known to display errors when presenting the information via the phone app. Since the phone app is the only option for account management it's very limited in the type of information it presents. Let's just say the information has a way of changing from time to time when viewing it on the app. It kind of reminds me of an early Robinhood app that ended up being a very good platform as it matured. I did learn something about the technical support department within Landa. 

1. They use some type of bot replies to make it appear that you have a live response.

2. The canned responses are very misleading, and can be frustrating.

3. They don't have any accountability, and can basically provide little to no real help. 

4. They will use the line "I will add a technical ticket" to any question that is not simple. 

5. Do not count on support to resolve your issue or provide any type of follow-up.

As you can see for my last issue because it was such a small amount, I just let it ride for an entire month without so much as a peep from Landa. This confirms my suspicion that Landa isn't looking for partners to purchase housing to rent out, and share profits.  They are looking to boost the user base, and inflate the total number of app users. Still not convinced, take a look at my final screenshot. 

This is what I received when I attempted to purchase another property that would have had a good return year after year.  Again, like I said before, a lot of Landa's staff is offshore, and it's listed as a software company. In this day and age of information being the most valuable commodity, the business model is starting to make more sense. 

Drop a comment if you have any questions, or just enjoy the read. If you absolutely hate it, drop a comment and let me know. I am always looking for others' points of view.

Thank you.

 

Landa-APP risk and rewards.

09-1-2022

Landa.app Be careful.

   

    Today I would like to cover Landa.app. This is a company that has been around for a bit, and from what I can gather is on version 2 of their release.    Let's jump right in, and take a look at the Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. 

 

    I was initially turned onto the Landa.app by a friend of mine who loves to try out new ways of creating income streams.  In this instance Landa.app has the sparkling promise of letting you become a landlord and generating income from rent for as little as $5 USD.  It also has the bonus that if you sign up using a referral code, you and your referral person get a bonus.  All of this turned out to be true, I signed into Landa using his referral program and was granted a single share of ownership in a property. The initial sign-up process for me was a bit of a problem. In my case, they ask you to link a banking account to your Landa.app account. I did this using my savings account and validated the .02 deposit.  This is where things went off the rails for me. My assumption was that since I validated with a savins account when I did my first deposit it would come out of said savins account. This was not the case, instead, Landa.app opted to pull the initial deposit from my checking account, creating a non-sufficent funds overdraft fee for me.  So my dream of earning extra cash via real estate just cost me $20.00.  I reached out to Land.apps support but, they were little to no help. I chalked this up to a learning experience and made attempt number two at funding my account. Attempt 2 was successful, but still odd since I never validated my checking account for ACH but the important part was I could now purchase a property. 

Let me share a little bit about what I bought, and where I am with this investment.  I obtained 1 free property valued at 6.33 (this was after the initial gift property was taken away due to my NSF issue).  Apr $.02 May $.02 June $.05 July $.07 Aug $.07. As you can see it's not much but it's consistent with growth.  This property has not gone up in value according to the Landa.app property page, but it was a gift that keeps on giving. Some of you may be thinking that Landa.app is great and you want to jump on board, but there are a few things to consider.  

    Landa.app is an investment, and they tell you in the documentation that it's a risky investment. This means that it's possible everything can go south and you lose everything you put in.  The 2nd thing to consider is who is running the operations behind scenes operations and makes the decisions for Landa.app.   If you look at Landa.app Linkedin profile you will find that the company lists itself as a software development company in addition to a real estate company.  The other item that might be of concern is that a good portion of its employees are based within Israel according to Landa's Linked-in profile.  "see screen shot below"

  

This might be a show-stopper for some, but in my case, I went ahead and bought a few shares of houses listed on their site.   I will share that experience in future blog posts providing a bit more detail on the issues I encountered. 

If after reading this you still want to get started with Landa.app check out the following link. 

https://landa.app/   You can use a scanner to download the app and get started.  If you would like my referral code leave a comment below, and I will send it to you. 

If you have questions or comments please leave them below.