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?
