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Comment by HarryHirsch | Hacker News Reader

But what do they actually do, and why do you need a startup to do it? Hanover, NH has a housing price problem, but Dartmouth College offers subsidized housing to its faculty. Why can't school districts do the same?

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Housing affordability is a pervasive problem. All modestly compensated professions are at risk including all manner of repair and maintenance job. Subsidizing all low end housing is not possible, so there must be some way to make housing available to those in need.

It should be understood that current circumstances have no precedent in history and show signs of market dysfunction. Just as most famines are complicated if not caused by market failures so the current lack of housing appears to be related to systemic failures. It is no coincidence that we are seeing rapid increases not only in people without homes but also homes without people at the same time as high end luxury estates intended as financial gambling chips go for decades without any residents moving in.

Because Dartmouth is sitting on a $4.5B endowment that earns $90MM/year, while the NH Education Department is barely breaking even (and according to proposals, actually likely needs $800MM injected into it to catch up to where it should be)?

Hi, I'm one of the co-founders of Landed. Some great answers below. Some additions: 1. The only thing I'll add is that schools that have implemented similar programs have largely done so out of necessity/desperation. Given the choice, they'd much prefer to not have dedicated internal resources managing housing financing for their staff. 2. Companies can also provide benefits of scale that could make all of these programs better off. The biggest weakness of a shared-equity investment product is a lack of liquidity (no market for resale). Each school having its own program with different rules and investment structure provides no opportunity for a standard institutional product. A standard institutional product would bring more competitive pricing because investors wouldn't have to be worried about holding positions for indeterminate periods of time. 3. The idea is that this is not subsidized housing. The idea is that there might be an opportunity to take existing real estate private equity capital flows and direct them to cooperate with buyers instead of compete with them.

The blog post doesn't say, but if you dig through their site you eventually find an explanation. Go here then click on "how it works": https://landed.com

No idea why the direct link to that is broken.

Anyway, it looks like, they pay your down payment, then take 25% of any profit when you sell.

Half of your down payment.

Fascinating. I'm curious if this will work, strong(er) incentive to not sell and unlikely that a teacher will receive a sudden windfall permitting them to move. But, maybe if they are a part of the success story of a neighborhood, they can share the increase in their equity with Landed.com. I love the long term bet that is happening here with this startup and their customers.

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