He wanted you to own a piece of a rental house for the price of a coffee. So he built the machine that made it a real transaction.
Walk into most conversations about real estate and you hear the same wall going up: the down payment, the mortgage, the closing costs, the years. Yishai Cohen looked at that wall and priced the door at five dollars.
That is the whole premise of Landa, the New York company he co-founded in 2019 with the engineer Amit Assaraf. Landa buys a rental house, wraps it in its own LLC, and splits it into somewhere between ten thousand and a hundred thousand shares. You open the app, you buy a share, and a fraction of a real home in Atlanta or Tampa starts paying you rent. The pitch fit on a matchbook: real estate ownership, minus the mortgage.
Cohen ran it as CEO. At its peak Landa held roughly 400 properties - single-family homes, townhouses, small apartment buildings - across seven American markets, with more than 25,000 people holding shares. He raised close to $100 million to get there, split between equity from venture firms and debt to buy the actual bricks.
What makes the story worth telling is not the size of the number. It is who was holding the pen. Cohen came to residential real estate with no background in it at all. Some read that as recklessness. His investors read it as the reason he could even imagine the thing.
Real estate ownership is the biggest source of wealth generation, and it's out of reach for most Americans.
Before Landa there was SmartBus. Cohen built it in Jerusalem at sixteen - a B2B marketplace for bus companies, a small piece of transport infrastructure dreamed up by someone who could not yet vote. He sold it a couple of years later, around the time he was heading into Israel's compulsory military service.
Think about the sequence for a moment. Founder, then soldier, then founder again. Most people spend their late teens deciding on a major. Cohen had already booked a startup, a sale, and a service obligation. The investor Gigi Levy-Weiss reportedly knew him from those teenage years - a relationship that would later help open doors.
When he came out the other side, he did not reach for something small. He reached for the $43 trillion U.S. residential housing market, holding a degree in economics and politics and an appetite that had not shrunk in the army.
He was a startup founder before he could legally rent a car in America.
Anyone can say "democratize real estate." It is one of the most over-printed slogans in tech. Cohen's version had a paper trail: SEC filings, a separate legal entity for every house, and a marketplace where shares could actually change hands. The magic trick was not the app. It was everything underneath it.
Landa acquired homes in high-cash-flow markets, then formed an LLC for each one and cut it into 10,000 to 100,000 shares. One house, thousands of owners.
Not a spreadsheet operation. Cohen built field teams for maintenance and property management, plus a separate app just for the tenants living in the homes.
Shares paid dividends from rent and could be bought and sold in-app - an attempt to give the least liquid asset on earth the feel of a stock ticker.
The $5 entry point allows them to build confidence over time and increase their portfolio as they get comfortable.
We built our own teams in the field doing maintenance, property management and building an app for residents.
There is a huge appetite to access this market among the many people who can't participate in traditional real estate investing.
Landa spun up a distinct LLC for every single house it owned. Hundreds of homes meant hundreds of tiny companies.
The headquarters sat on West 18th Street in Manhattan - while most of the actual houses were down in Atlanta.
The entire value proposition compressed into two characters: $5.
He thinks in fractions. Where others saw a house, Cohen saw 10,000 tradable pieces.
By 2025 the experiment had run into the wall it was built to knock down. Dividends stopped. The portal went dark. Investors described watching holdings they could no longer reach or sell. Lenders alleged missed property taxes, neglected homes, and rents that never got collected. A New York judge declined to grant Landa's injunction and ordered it to pay roughly $100,000; Landa countersued.
Cohen's public statement was measured: the team was aware of the issues, he said, and working to restore full functionality. What comes next is being decided in a courtroom, not a pitch deck.
It is tempting to file this as a simple morality tale about a young founder in over his head. The more useful reading is quieter. Landa was a real attempt to answer a real question - can the least liquid asset on earth be made to trade like equity? - and the answer, so far, has been expensive. The interesting founders always attempt the impossible thing first. Sometimes it breaks on them.
Ownership shouldn't require permission. Cohen bet his twenties on that sentence - and on the belief that fresh eyes beat industry scar tissue. The market is still grading the exam.
We are actively working to restore full functionality as soon as possible.
Yishai Cohen is the co-founder and CEO of Landa, a New York fintech that tried to turn houses into stocks - letting anyone buy a share of a rental home for as little as $5. A teenage entrepreneur from Jerusalem who sold his first company (a bus-booking marketplace) before finishing military service, Cohen raised roughly $100M and amassed some 400 properties across seven U.S. markets. By 2025 the platform had gone dark amid lender lawsuits, missed dividends, and the loss of much of its portfolio.
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