The idea of becoming a real estate investor for only 5 US dollars seems too good to be true.
And for many users of Landa, a Proptech company that promised that – it was.
Landa was created in August 2022 from Stealth and announced a total of 33 million US dollars of funds and a promise to help everyday Americans easier to access residential property investments through fractional stocks.
CEO Yishai Cohen and former CTO Amit Assaraf founded Landa in 2019 to make real estate investments more integrative. The only requirements of the app were that users are over 18 years old and the US residents. You could invest and sell shares with just 5 US dollars and see real-time updates on your real estate from the Landa app. (Asaraf left the company in December 2023 according to its LinkedIn profile. He did not answer inquiries about comments.)
Today the investment portal location of Landa is reduced and his app does not operate. Users claim that they cannot access their funds and have not been received dividends for months. The startup is involved in legal disputes, including a lawsuit of the early risk chisel system viola.
An early user said Techcrunch that Landa did not pay dividends for his shares in January. When he asked Landa about it, “they were correct,” he said.
“I repeatedly sent them an e -mail and have just distracted answers, nothing real,” said the user. “Then, a few months later, the app became unusable. It would not open.”
The user then asked if he could extinguish his account that he had opened in 2021 and could sell the shares. But he found that Landa had deactivated his ability to sell shares.
“They essentially frozen me from my means and simply closed the app,” said the user. “Where’s the money? Why doesn’t she give it back to me?”
Over 130 complaints were submitted to Landa to the Better Business Bureau, with dozens of people reflect similar allegations. For example, on May 1, a user who submitted such a complaint shared that they invested over 8,000 US dollars via Landa and had no longer received dividends last autumn. The user said Landa Customer Service replied to his e -mails by saying that the company “was working on it”.
In mid-April, when Techcrunch Landa asked about the problem of the status of its discontinued location and the question of whether the company itself was closed, said CEO Cohen: “Of course not. The website will rise again.”
When asked why the app did not work and why users had not received dividends for months, Cohen’s tight answer still seemed to refer to the website and blame the servers: “It has nothing to do with dividends. It comes from our servers. We are there.”
After further disorders, Cohen informed the following explanation on April 18: “We are aware of the current problems on our platform and our product and would like to assure all investors that we are actively working on restoring full functionality as soon as possible. We have kept the investors up to date, which has made investors up to date through all updates, including the output of server access.
Cohen did not answer our request for a status update on May 20. Investors NFX and 83north did not answer our numerous inquiries about comments.
In a lawsuit
It is not just users who are upset about Landa. Sue the company’s main loans.
In November 2024, Viola Credit and L Finance submitted a lawsuit to the Supreme Court of the State of New York and accused them of “numerous failures” for loans of over 35 million dollars that they had extended to the company. (Viola is also an investor in Landa through his venture department.)
The lenders also accused the lack of property tax payments that led to the forced sale of these properties, neglect real estate and even not to move in.
In the lawsuit – first reported from the publication of the real estate industry to Bisnow – it says that after more than a year of the attempt to comply with Landa to assess their obligations, Landa as managers of the houses and appointed an independent ownership manager and a chief restricing officer.
After further negotiations had failed, the creditor later called for the court and were given an interim path that the Landa blocked the access to bank accounts, which affects their attempts to restructure the business and the recovery of money, which they say that they are owed – including proceeds from the turnover of real estate.
Despite the injunction, the lenders returned to court in January 2025 and claimed Landa asked the tenants to send rent payments to another bank account that was not covered by the judgment. They discovered this when they carried out repairs on a property system of a property. They also accused the CEO of Landas to sell or refinance some properties.
The court ordered Landa to explain himself. Instead, at the beginning of March, Landa asked for an injunction against Viola Credit and L Finance and claimed that the independent manager was “unlawful”.
Judge Jennifer G. Schecter was not pleased. In March she ordered both sides to find a solution that is good for all of her customers. She made Landa’s application for an injunction and ordered the company to pay almost 100,000 US dollars. A few weeks later, Landa submitted a formal contrast. The case is still pending.
Challenging model
Landa is just one of several start -ups that have appeared in recent years and offer fractional investments. Apparently it is not the only thing that fought – especially after the mortgage interest rates rose in 2022.
Fintor collected millions of dollars before it was apparently difficult to offer a “AI agent to automate financial and real estate operation with the performance of human level”. The NADA, based in Dallas, offered the index-like real estate investment products called “Cityfunds”, which did not allow investors to be acquired with only $ 250 into the home stock market of a city, also seems to have swiveled. The website is now promoting a new slogan: “Access to home capital to finance everything”.
When I arrived, the highest profile of the Haufens and the only one was actively working under the same model. In May 2022, Techcrunch reported that the Serie-A round financing round of $ 25 million was brought in, including Bezos expeditions, so that people can buy shares in single-family rentals with “only $ 100”. According to its website, the startup has so far paid over $ 13 million of dividends and interest and has 766,000 registered investors.
Those people who have invested with Landa appear uncertain the future of their money. From May 23, the Landas Investor Portal website will continue to forward a “Com-Back-Aon” maintenance message.