Landed

Landed (Landed Technologies, Inc.) designs and manages employer-funded housing loan and down payment programs for hospitals, health systems and colleges. Under its current model, an employer creates a "housing endowment" that co-invests alongside targeted employees for up to 40% of a home's price, which the company says reduces a participant's home financing costs by nearly half. Participants must exit the program when their employment ends, so the capital is recovered and recycled to the next participant. Landed positions this shared-appreciation structure against housing stipends and forgivable loan programs, and against internally run employer housing benefits, which it argues can conflict with state regulations and create legal exposure and collection problems.

The company handles program administration, regulatory compliance and participant communication on behalf of the employer's benefits team. Y Combinator describes the offering as white-labeled shared appreciation down payment programs for employers, structured so that funders and buyers both participate in appreciation and the capital pool renews as homebuyers exit.

Earlier, Landed operated a direct-to-consumer business, including homebuying support marketed as Landed Navigator and access to its proprietary down payment program (DPP) for individual buyers. Both were discontinued or paused as the company refocused on organizational partners, with existing DPP customers directed to a post-purchase support address.

Founding story

Alex Lofton, Jonathan Asmis and Jesse Vaughan founded Landed in 2015 with the stated aim of supporting educators and healthcare workers — in the company's phrasing, to "uphold those who uphold us." Lofton, the son of a fourth-grade teacher and a social worker, had worked on President Obama's 2007–08 field team and at real estate developer Forest City, and holds a B.A. from Northwestern and an MBA from Stanford. Asmis began his career as a biomedical engineer working on vaccines in Toronto before moving into structured financial products, including social impact bonds and the securitization of energy storage revenues; he is a graduate of the University of Toronto and Stanford Business School.

Business model

Landed contracts with employers — health systems, hospitals and colleges — to set up and operate housing benefit programs funded by the employer rather than by Landed. The employer capitalizes a housing endowment; Landed structures the shared-appreciation co-investment, administers the program, manages compliance and communications, and handles collections when participants leave employment. Historically the company also raised capital from institutional investors to fund down payment assistance directly for essential professionals.

Landed is engaged by employers to set up and run their down payment and housing loan programs, providing administration, compliance and communications services; the underlying capital is contributed by the employer's housing endowment and recycled as participants exit.

Traction

Landed says it has helped essential professionals purchase more than $1 billion worth of homes and has supported thousands of education and healthcare professionals across more than 25 states. In a published case study, Montage Health on the Monterey Peninsula ran a housing endowment for physicians and executives in which 30% of new physicians bought long-term homes through the program, with 100% collection from exiting physicians and less than 1% of the system endowment invested. In a second, unnamed large health system, Landed took over an existing shared appreciation program and expanded it to all staff, housing five staff per month with less than 0.5% of system assets invested and a stated goal of saving $10 million per year in attrition costs.

Latest developments

Landed now works exclusively with education and healthcare employers, after discontinuing its direct-to-consumer Landed Navigator homebuying support and pausing new homebuyer access to its proprietary down payment program. Its work with essential professionals in California and Colorado was taken over by the state-level California Dream For All and Educator First Home Ownership programs.