Cyril Berdugo and the space between a house and a home

A child visiting a building site can learn several versions of what a house is worth. There is the price of the land, the cost of construction and the figure on the eventual sale. Then there is what changes for the family moving in. Cyril Berdugo grew up around that last calculation. Years later, after a career spent evaluating transactions, he would try to build a business around it.

Berdugo’s father developed affordable housing. As a boy in Paris, Cyril accompanied him to project sites. The family connection went back another generation: his grandparents had emigrated from Morocco, and his father had grown up in subsidized housing. Property was a family business with a memory attached. A set of keys could represent the end of a long period of uncertainty.

Today, Berdugo is the New York-based co-founder and CEO of Landis. The company’s proposition rearranges a familiar order of events. A prospective homeowner can move into a house before qualifying for the mortgage needed to purchase it. Landis buys the property; the client rents while preparing to buy. The ambition is clear. Delivering it requires rather more than opening the front door.

Before the spreadsheet, the building site

There is a particular education in watching work happen before you understand its financing. Berdugo has described learning from his father that necessary tasks deserve attention regardless of their size or glamour. That is a useful preparation for entrepreneurship, a profession whose public image contains considerably fewer administrative chores than its working week.

His formal education took him to Emory University’s Goizueta Business School, where he studied finance and real estate and graduated in 2011. An MBA at Stanford followed. Between the classroom and the company, he accumulated experience in the machinery that moves money into buildings.

At Houlihan Lokey, his work involved advising companies on mergers, acquisitions and financing. He later became a director at Crown Acquisitions, working in a business focused on retail and office real estate. Fifth Wall added venture investing to the mix. These roles put him near different decisions: which asset to acquire, how a transaction should be financed, which young company might deserve a check.

The later Landis problem would draw on all three. A company purchasing houses for future buyers needs property judgment, money and an operating model that works repeatedly. Good intentions cannot perform an inspection or sign a lending agreement. Berdugo had chosen a mission that would keep his previous occupations unusually busy.

Two MBAs, ten conversations a day

At Stanford, he met Tom Petit. Berdugo brought real estate experience and industry relationships. Petit brought a mathematics background from Cambridge and experience in data science, including work at Airbnb. They had complementary ways of looking at a property: one understood the transaction; the other could build tools to sort and match the information around it.

The early Landis was an investment-property platform. In 2018, the founders described using data and machine learning to connect single-family property sellers with institutional buyers. Berdugo recalled sitting down with brokers to explain his investment criteria. Making those preferences more systematic had helped him complete more deals.

The founders said they spoke with ten buyers a day during their first months of product development. That detail is more revealing than the usual romance of the business-school encounter. They were testing what people actually wanted to purchase. An algorithm can be elegant and still spend its afternoon recommending the wrong house.

The history contains a change of emphasis worth keeping visible. Forbes’s early profile dates Landis to 2017 and describes tools for investors. Later biographies date the homeownership company to 2018. By 2019, its public proposition centered on helping renters become buyers, and it reported raising $15 million for its property acquisition strategy. The original investor platform and the later consumer mission belong to the same story, with a turn between them.

Let the keys arrive first

The homeownership model begins with a mismatch in timing. Someone wants a particular home and can afford a housing payment, but cannot yet obtain the mortgage required to buy it. The seller has a schedule. The lender has criteria. The hopeful buyer has both a deadline and homework.

Landis inserts itself into that gap. In the program described in 2022, a client applied, supplied financial information and searched within an approved budget, working with a real estate agent. Landis handled the purchase, making a cash offer. The client then rented the home while receiving support to build savings and improve mortgage readiness.

Real estate agents and mortgage lenders also had a role. An agent could refer a customer who was not ready to buy, while a loan officer could offer a possible next step after a rejection. Landis was building a business partly around transactions that otherwise might stop at that point.

The distinction between living in a house and owning it remains consequential. During the rental period, the title belongs to Landis. The client’s intended destination is a separate purchase. Coaching may help someone prepare, but a lender still makes the eventual mortgage decision. Moving the date of that decision creates time in which to work; it also creates a period that must be paid for.

The famous names and the less famous work

Landis’s investors supplied an unusually recognizable supporting cast. In July 2021, it announced $165 million in debt and Series A equity financing, with Sequoia leading the round and participation from Will Smith’s Dreamers VC and Arrive, associated with Jay-Z’s Roc Nation. The combination attracted attention well beyond property technology.

Berdugo was careful about the identity he wanted for the company. In 2021, he said he wanted Landis to be understood as a homeownership program. The intended endpoint was a sale to the resident. That ambition placed a particular burden on the business: the rental period had to lead somewhere useful.

“We do not want to be perceived as a single-family rental fund.”

Cyril Berdugo, 2021

In October 2022, Landis raised a $40 million Series B led by GV. Its announcement earmarked $2 million for expanding coaching and reported that applications had grown more than sevenfold since the previous year’s funding announcement. Those figures describe capital and demand. Neither is a count of households that completed a purchase.

His approach to investors had been more selective than a celebrity list suggests. In a joint 2019 interview, Berdugo and Petit emphasized the value of partners who understood their business and its market. They prioritized that understanding over an investment firm’s size. For a company mixing technology with physical property, patient comprehension is a fairly practical item to request.

A 2022 company essay also recalled moving the first client’s furniture. It is an appealingly literal image of a founder helping someone move toward ownership. Eventually, however, a business must make such assistance repeatable. A useful coach needs a workable caseload, clear information and enough time. The furniture cannot always depend on the availability of the CEO.

A promise with a price attached

The mechanics deserve as much attention as the mission. In its 2022 description, Landis offered a predetermined repurchase price that increased with time. A known future price can help a client set a savings target. It cannot settle every other number involved in buying a home.

A mortgage rate may change. A lender’s assessment may differ from the program’s forecast. The household still needs to meet the requirements in force when it applies. For Berdugo, that creates a difficult operating problem: the company can organize the preparation, while an essential final decision belongs to someone else.

On October 18, 2024, Tangela Bankston and Tiffany Robinson filed a proposed class-action complaint in federal court in Pennsylvania. It named Landis entities, Berdugo, Petit and investors as defendants. The plaintiffs alleged deceptive rent-to-own practices, including disputes over costs, repair obligations and the promised route to ownership. They brought federal and state claims. These were allegations, not findings of liability.

The filing challenges the company at the point most central to its stated purpose: what the arrangement delivers for the resident. Berdugo’s ambition gives that question its force. A business built around access to ownership invites scrutiny of how access is defined, what a customer pays during the attempt and what happens when the intended purchase does not occur.

Back in the classroom

In March 2024, Berdugo returned to Emory for a fireside chat at its entrepreneurship summit. Thirteen years after his BBA, he sat before students as a founder whose career had crossed banking, property investment and venture capital. The questions now came from people considering their own first steps.

His professional life extends beyond Landis. Emory’s speaker biography describes investments in early-stage companies and directorships at real estate investment company TP NYC and nonprofit itrek. He has also spoken publicly about the need to let experienced colleagues exercise their judgment. A founder’s range is useful; an organization cannot indefinitely operate as an extension of one person’s calendar.

That calendar has its own rules. Berdugo has described becoming more deliberate about making time for people close to him. In his public comments about recognition, he credits the Landis team, partners and shareholders. The picture is of someone who talks about success through relationships as well as transactions.

The childhood building sites remain a useful place to return. They connect an asset to the people who will inhabit it. Berdugo’s career supplied the language of financing; Landis made him responsible for translating a housing conviction into an operating company. The meaningful moment in that translation is specific: a resident who hoped to buy becomes the owner. Everything leading up to it has to earn its place.