Landed
Model & Strategy
Landed is focused on helping schools, hospitals and local governments retain and attract talent by addressing housing for their staff. Educators, medical workers, and municipal government employees are essential members of every community, but in expensive places, many cannot save fast enough for a down payment on a first home. This is exacerbating attrition problems throughout expensive metropolitan areas, which in turn diminishes outcomes in education, healthcare and other key sectors of the economy.
Landed organizes private capital from both impact and traditional institutional investors into funds that cover half to three-quarters of a standard 20% down payment for local home buying educators. In return, investors receive similar returns to buying and renting out apartments (but without the trouble of being a landlord). These innovative funds share the risk of homeownership with their buyers and are not debt funds.
One autumn evening at graduate school, Jonathan, the formally trained engineer turned management consultant, met Alex, the political campaign organizer turned start-up executive. Shaking hands, they immediately debated the impact of driverless cars on urban places and how companies like Airbnb and Lyft forced cities to think bigger. Fast forward a year and a half later, all the while growing together both in- and outside of the classroom, they shook hands again, this time committing to live their values by building saner and safer ways for people to build wealth in cities.
They had witnessed and studied the traumatic impact of the ‘09 real estate crisis – the largest wealth transfer from poor to rich in history – and vowed never again; building wealth meant more opportunity for individuals, and more people with more opportunity meant a strong society. Over a cup of coffee before class one day, Jonathan and Alex realized they had idea symmetry: co-ownership is a more dynamic but underutilized way to move from renting to owning your first home. Upon graduation, Landed was born; they set-out to make ownership smarter and more accessible to more people.
Jonathan and Alex are 2015 graduates of the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Before business school, Alex was an early employee on the 2008 Obama campaign before moving to San Francisco to help companies in the ‘Sharing Economy’ navigate growth challenges. Jonathan was a management consultant while working on a number of urban policy issues including immigration settlement, affordable housing and transit policy.
IMPACT
The retention of essential professionals is an important part of building healthy communities. As an example, teacher retention is a driver of school quality, particularly in high-poverty, high-minority schools. At the same time, homeownership is one of the largest long-term wealth drivers for essential workers.
Collateral requirements (like down payments) are often solved with intergenerational wealth transfers from parents to children. By getting institutional investors to contribute some of that collateral, Landed opens up homeownership to a much more racially diverse population.
To date, Landed has enabled over 500 essential professionals to build over $17M of incremental wealth. Landed has helped essential professionals buy nearly $1 billion worth of residential real estate.
