Lande review
7.5
(our review)
LANDE is an international platform for agricultural loans, offering an average return of over 11 percent (before delays & defaults). In our latest review, LANDE scored an 7.5. The platform and its team appear solid, though project information is limited and the platform’s total volume is still limited.
Contents:
Note: Investing online via LANDE involves risks; you may lose part or all of your investment.
What defines LANDE?
LANDE is a European crowdfunding platform that allows you to invest in agricultural loan projects. This includes financing land, crops, or machinery. It is based in Latvia and finances much working capital and other loans for local farmers and projects.
The platform has been operating since 2019 and has ambitions to expand into other European countries. It offers financing backed partly by collateral such as land or machinery, with an average return of over 11,2 percent.
Investors most often compare LANDE with InSoil, EstateGuru and InRento.
Invest via Mintos, Europe’s P2P leader with 11.62% average return, or EstateGuru for property-secured real estate loans across Europe. Investing involves risks. You can lose your investment.
Creating an account and transferring funds
Creating an account on LANDE is easy. You only need an ID, and no video or other documents are required. After creating the account, it can take up to 72 hours for it to be approved. For us, this process took less than a day.
After that, you can transfer funds to the platform via a bank transfer to a French IBAN provided by LemonWay, a payment institution that securely processes transactions. Unfortunately, we could not find any credit card, PayPal or any other payment solutions. To withdraw funds, you must first get your IBAN approved by submitting a bank statement no older than one month.
Offerings: agricultural projects in Eastern Europe
On LANDE, you invest in agricultural companies that can offer land or machinery as collateral. Projects often focus on business investments such as new machinery, inventory, or even working capital. Some of these loans carry relatively high risks, so it is recommended to spread your investments across different projects.
At the time of writing, several projects are offered in Romania and the Baltic states. The platform is expanding into Poland and eventually aims to become a financing platform for the agricultural sector across Europe. We found particularly low default rates among Baltic projects, which is why they are our preferred choice.
Many investors compare LANDE vs InSoil. Both are European platforms for agricultural loans. We currently prefer LANDE because it has a simpler structure. However, InSoil sometimes offers higher gross returns and provides a broader range of investment opportunities, including green loans and carbon credit projects.
Collateral coverage
The quality of the projects is good, but if something goes wrong with a farming business, the consequences can be severe. If farming conditions worsen, due to bad weather or fluctuating commodity prices, for example, problems can arise quickly. These risks also apply to the collateral.
At LANDE, loan-to-value ratios are often very good. However, despite the collateral, you still risk losing your investment on LANDE. If payment issues arise due to accessibility or land quality problems, or due to the stability of a sector or region, it is uncertain whether the land used as collateral will still be usable or sellable.
In countries such as the Netherlands, Germany or France the quality and value of farmland are often easy to assess, but in Eastern Europe, there are significant differences in risks and value.
Some examples of projects.
User-friendliness and information provided
The platform works quickly and easily on both desktop and mobile. A mobile app would typically offer a better experience, but the dashboard functions well, and investing is easy. However, it can be challenging to assess projects properly. Unlike most crowdfunding platforms, it does not share credit scores.
For each project, LANDE provides basic figures, such as details about the offered collateral, the loan term, and the reason the entrepreneur is taking the loan. However, you cannot base a risk analysis on this alone. At Investmentplatforms.eu, we would like to see more transparency regarding business operations.
Auto-Invest function and secondary market
LANDE offers an Auto-Invest feature for investors who want the platform to automatically spread their funds across a large number of projects. You can set the type of projects you want the platform to consider. It also offers a secondary market if you wish to exit early.
Financial information on borrowers
The borrower’s name is always included in the pitch, so you can look up public information, such as annual reports. However, few investors do this, so much remains unclear. The pitch often doesn’t show how long the company has been in business or its recent performance. This makes it difficult to assess repayment capacity. Information on collateral is provided, but this is usually a last resort.
According to various platform publications, around 6 percent of projects are at least five days late with payments, and a similar percentage is listed as defaulted. For this reason, we advise against investing too much in one project. LANDE is suitable for investors who want to spread their investments across multiple projects.
Returns
Although we have been investing on the platform for a while, the team at Investmentplatforms.eu does not yet have enough loans to provide a comprehensive assessment of LANDE‘s returns. The platform itself reports a return of 11.2%. We expect this to be the gross return.
This is an average if every loan reaches maturity. The costs of delays and defaults are probably not yet included. With 5.4% defaulted and quite some loans delayed, we still expect a return above 9 percent with a well-diversified portfolio.
Reliability and safety
At Investmentplatforms.eu, we find the platform to be reliable, with a solid background and sufficient information about the team and operations. The management team has extensive experience in the financial sector, and founder Nikita Goncars has over 10 years of experience in loans.
LANDE holds an ECSP license from the Latvian financial regulator (Latvijas Banka), meaning it complies with strict European regulations, similar to those imposed by financial regulators in other EU countries on crowdfunding platforms.
Although it operates since 2019, LANDE is still a relatively small platform by it’s total volume. As with all startups and scale-ups, it is not impossible that the platform itself will encounter difficulties.
Review score: 7.5
In our latest review, LANDE scored an 7.5. We are impressed with what the LANDE team has accomplished this far. The returns are good, though the projects are not without risk. Investors that are new to the platform need to be aware that the collateral, although quite good, is no guarantee that your money is safe.
LANDE is growing rapidly at the time of writing, but its total volume is still limited. Additionally, the platform could provide more information about the companies seeking financing. In our view, this information is insufficient for a thorough analysis.
Nevertheless, it is one of the platforms we actively follow, and we invest on it ourselves. If you frequently invest in crowdfunding and want to diversify across multiple platforms, agricultural loans in Eastern Europe offer a nice diversification alongside regular crowdfunding projects or peer-to-peer loans.
