Lande Review - Licensed Latvian Agri Lending With Real Collateral and No Buyback

Latvian crowdfunding platform lending to farmers in Latvia, Lithuania, Romania and Poland, secured on farmland, agricultural machinery and grain. Lande holds a genuine ECSP authorisation from Latvijas Banka, publishes audited accounts, and runs a conservative average loan-to-value of 41%. The trade-offs are structural: there is no buyback, the entities holding the security are Lande’s own subsidiaries, and enforcement on defaulted farm collateral has repeatedly taken a long time.

What is Lande in 60 seconds

Lande is not a marketplace that resells other lenders’ loans. It underwrites and lists the loans itself: a farmer in Latvia, Lithuania, Romania or Poland applies for financing, Lande’s credit team assesses the farm, and the loan is published on the platform for retail investors to fund from €50 upwards. Security depends on the product. Land purchase loans (12 to 60 months) are secured by a mortgage over the farmland. Machinery loans (12 to 36 months) are secured by a commercial pledge over the equipment. Short seasonal loans (3 to 12 months) are backed by a personal guarantee from the farmer plus a three-way agreement between the farmer, Lande and the grain buyer, so that sale proceeds route back to repayment. There is no buyback: if a borrower stops paying, investors depend on Lande enforcing the security, not on anyone repurchasing the loan.

Strengths

• A real ECSP authorisation, independently verifiable. Lande operates under authorisation No. 27-10/2024/23, issued by Latvijas Banka on 7 February 2024 under Regulation (EU) 2020/1503, the EU crowdfunding regulation. The register entry names the permitted activities explicitly: facilitating the granting of loans, operating a bulletin board, applying credit scores to projects, suggesting pricing, and individual loan portfolio management. It is passported across most of the EEA. This is verifiable in the public register rather than asserted in marketing copy, which is not true of every platform in this segment.

• Not on the Bank of Latvia warning list. On 24 October 2025 Latvijas Banka published a list of companies operating without the appropriate licence or authorisation for financial services, updated on 14 July 2026. The list names 15 companies, including several well-known P2P brands. Lande is not among them, and Lande’s own entry appears in the authorised-provider register instead. For a Latvian-domiciled platform in 2026 this is a meaningful distinction.

• Conservative loan-to-value, backed by hard assets. Lande’s stated policy is an LTV of 40% to 60%, supplemented by personal guarantees, and the actual portfolio average is 41%. Farmland is a slow-moving, cash-generating asset class with an EU subsidy floor under it, which is a different risk profile from unsecured consumer credit. Since 2024 the platform has discontinued higher-risk harvest and livestock lending, and reports that roughly 90% of newly funded loans are now backed by land or machinery.

• Audited, published, and profitable at the operator level. SIA LANDE Platform files audited annual reports and publishes them alongside auditor statements for 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025. The 2025 audit, signed 28 May 2026 by SIA Orients Audit & Finance, is a clean unqualified opinion with no going-concern qualification. The operator turned over €2.36M in 2025, up 20.5% year on year, and posted a profit of €206,485 with €722,593 of equity. A platform that funds its own operations from fees rather than from investor inflow is structurally less fragile than one that does not.

• Monthly reporting that names specific recovery cases. Lande publishes a performance report every month with volumes, new investor counts, interest paid, and a debt-collection-stage breakdown. The reports name individual cases: full recovery on Lithuanian project 220921-157364 (May 2026 report), recoveries from named Romanian borrowers (July 2026 report), and restructurings where three delayed Romanian loans were consolidated into one land-secured loan. Naming cases is more transparency than most peers offer, even when the news is mixed.

Things to Watch

• The entities holding the collateral are Lande’s own subsidiaries. The security on investors’ behalf is held by SIA SF MGMT Collateral (Latvia), UAB LANDE LT (Lithuania), SRL LANDE PLATFORM RUM (Romania) and LANDE PL Sp. z o.o. (Poland). All four are wholly owned by SIA LANDE Platform, per the 2025 annual report. There is no independent trustee between the platform and the security. If the platform itself came under pressure, the party responsible for enforcing on investors’ behalf is inside the same group. Related-party expense flows in 2025 totalled €1,220,602. The audit also covers only the standalone platform entity: there are no consolidated group accounts, so the collateral-holding subsidiaries are not covered by any published audited financial statement.

• No buyback, and the help-centre wording obscures that. Lande’s help centre states that “the buyback guarantee is not provided for grain or real estate projects”, and that loan repayment is “guaranteed by collateral” for real-estate projects and by insurance, personal guarantees and three-way agreements for grain projects. Since grain and real-estate projects are essentially the entire product range, the practical answer is that there is no buyback at all. re:think P2P states it plainly: Lande does not offer any kind of buyback guarantee. Describing a security interest as a guarantee is also a stretch: a mortgage over farmland is a claim you must enforce, not a promise that you will be repaid.

• The published default disclosure does not reconcile. Under ECSPR Article 20, Lande discloses a 2025 default rate of 5.61% for publicly offered projects, based on 106 loans with at least one default against 1,956 non-defaulted loans, covering 7 February 2024 to 31 December 2025. Applying Lande’s own stated formula to its own stated inputs gives 5.42%, not 5.61%. Separately, the denominator counts only non-defaulted loans rather than all loans, which is not how most readers will interpret the number. The same disclosure forecasts the E risk category falling from 14.36% actual to 6.00% for 2026, while every other category is forecast flat or higher, with no stated justification. This is not evidence of wrongdoing, but a compliance disclosure that does not add up deserves a question to the platform.

• Enforcement on farm collateral is slow, and at least one case went badly. Lande’s own monthly reports state that most 90-plus-day loans are already at the bailiff stage. re:think P2P lists “significant time required to recover defaulted loans” as its single disadvantage. A Trustpilot reviewer (13 May 2025, one star) describes a machinery-secured loan where recovery ran roughly two years: the borrower claimed the tractor was broken, bailiffs found it in pieces, auctions failed, and Lande advanced the farmer further money to repair the collateral so that it could be sold. That is one unverified individual account, but it is specific and it goes directly to whether machinery security is realisable in practice. On the live loan book at 01.09.2026, €8.65M of €65.1M funded (13.3%) was five days late or worse, and €2.99M (4.6%) was in default.

• Service complaints cluster around withdrawals, and an inactivity fee is coming. Trustpilot shows 3.4 out of 5 from 47 reviews (01.09.2026), with a Trustpilot badge indicating the company has not replied to negative reviews. The recurring complaints are specific rather than generic: withdrawals blocked pending re-verification with a broken verification link, an IBAN verified and then un-verified with a six-week wait, and ticket-only support with no phone or email. Separately, re:think P2P reported on 7 August 2026 that Lande will introduce an inactivity fee from 5 October 2026: €10 per month in the first twelve months of inactivity, rising to €50 per month from month 13, triggered when an account has idle cash and no new investment for twelve months. This has not been verified against Lande’s own document and should be confirmed before you leave cash sitting on the platform.

How It Works

1. Register and verify. Open an account at lande.finance. You must be 18 or over, resident in the EEA, and hold a SEPA bank account. Legal entities are accepted. Identity verification (KYC, the standard identity check EU financial firms must run) applies.
2. Deposit in euro. Funds move by SEPA transfer and are handled through Lemon Way, a French payment institution regulated by the ACPR. Note that Lande is explicit that investments are covered by neither the deposit guarantee scheme (Directive 2014/49/EU) nor the investor compensation scheme (Directive 97/9/EC).
3. Pick loans, from €50 each. Every listing shows the borrower country, interest rate, term, risk category, LTV and collateral type. Lande states that roughly 5% of applications pass its selection.
4. Or let Auto-Invest do it. Basic Auto-Invest takes all loans without criteria. Advanced lets you filter on interest rate, term, LTV, collateral type, repayment type and borrower country.
5. Collect interest, and exit through the secondary market if you need to. Interest accrues per the loan schedule. Lande runs a secondary market, relaunched in June 2024, with no selling fee. Liquidity depends on finding a buyer, and late or defaulted loans are the hardest to sell.

Who Lande Is For

Lande suits investors who want asset-backed exposure outside the consumer-credit and urban-real-estate crowd, and who accept that recovery means enforcement rather than a buyback. Farmland at 41% average LTV in EU member states with subsidy support is a genuinely different risk than another Baltic consumer lender, and the ECSP authorisation plus published audited accounts put Lande ahead of the unlicensed part of the market. The €50 minimum and a free secondary market keep entry and partial exit reasonable.

Lande is not the right fit if you want a buyback safety net, if you need predictable liquidity, or if you expect fast resolution when a loan goes wrong: farm enforcement in Latvia, Lithuania, Romania and Poland runs through local bailiffs and courts and can take years. It is also a poor fit if you plan to park cash between opportunities, given the inactivity fee scheduled for October 2026, or if you want the comfort of an investor compensation scheme, which Lande does not have.

Compared to Alternatives

Lande vs. Maclear. Both are relatively small platforms lending against collateral rather than reselling other originators’ loans, and neither is covered by an investor compensation scheme. The difference is the regulatory frame. Lande holds an ECSP authorisation from Latvijas Banka under EU crowdfunding regulation, with a licence number and named permitted activities in a public register. Maclear operates under a Swiss self-regulatory organisation membership, which covers anti-money-laundering compliance and not investor protection. On the other side, Maclear’s borrowers are independent SMEs across Europe, while Lande’s collateral is held by Lande’s own subsidiaries, which is a conflict Maclear does not have in the same form. Investors who weight EU regulatory cover most heavily will prefer Lande; those focused on independence of the security chain from the platform will read it the other way.

Lande vs. Mintos. Mintos is the scale benchmark: a decade of history, a MiFID II licence with €20,000 investor compensation, dozens of independent loan originators, and a deep secondary market. Lande has none of that scale and no compensation scheme. What Lande has that Mintos does not is direct underwriting of tangible farm collateral at low LTV, which produces a different correlation profile from a portfolio of consumer-loan claims. Mintos wins decisively on diversification, liquidity and investor protection. Lande is best understood as a satellite position next to a Mintos core, sized to reflect that a defaulted farm loan is resolved by a bailiff, not a buyback.

Lande vs. InSoil. This is the closest functional peer: InSoil (formerly HeavyFinance) is also an ECSP-licensed Baltic platform lending to farmers against agricultural collateral. Both are regulated by their national central bank under Regulation (EU) 2020/1503, both underwrite directly, and both have had to work through slow agricultural recoveries. InSoil’s differentiators are its European Investment Fund cornerstone commitment and an explicit climate angle; Lande’s are a longer operating history under the LendSecured brand, an operator that is profitable, and monthly reports that name individual recovery cases. Realised returns on both have run below headline rates once delays are counted. Holding both is a reasonable way to diversify agricultural exposure across two underwriting teams and two jurisdictions rather than concentrating in one.

Bottom line on competitors. Lande sits in the licensed but unprotected middle of the market: a real EU authorisation and audited accounts on one side, no buyback and no compensation scheme on the other. Within EU agri lending it is one of only a handful of licensed options, which is its strongest argument.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Lande have a buyback guarantee? No. The help centre says buyback is not provided for grain or real-estate projects, which covers essentially the whole product range. Recovery depends on Lande enforcing the collateral: a mortgage on land, a commercial pledge on machinery, or personal guarantees and a three-way agreement with the grain buyer on seasonal loans. Collateral is not a guarantee of repayment.

Is Lande regulated? Yes. SIA LANDE Platform holds crowdfunding service provider authorisation No. 27-10/2024/23 from Latvijas Banka, in force since 7 February 2024 under Regulation (EU) 2020/1503. It is not on the Bank of Latvia list of companies operating without a licence published on 24 October 2025 and updated on 14 July 2026. Note that ECSP authorisation regulates conduct and disclosure. It does not insure your money, and Lande is explicitly outside both the deposit guarantee and investor compensation schemes.

What is Lande’s actual default rate? It depends which number you mean, and they differ. Lande’s ECSPR Article 20 disclosure gives 5.61% for 2025, though its own inputs (106 defaulted loans against 1,956 non-defaulted) produce 5.42%. On the live loan book at 01.09.2026, defaults were €2.99M of €65.1M funded, or 4.6% by amount, with a further €5.67M in the late buckets. re:think P2P, measuring defaults against the outstanding portfolio rather than cumulative funding, put the figure near 10.7% in June 2026. Lande does not publish a recovery rate or a loss rate, so the share of defaults that ultimately becomes a permanent investor loss is not disclosed.

Has Lande ever actually enforced on collateral? Yes, and it publishes cases. The May 2026 report records a full recovery on a Lithuanian defaulted loan with funds returned to investors, and the July 2026 report names two Romanian recoveries through settlement agreements. Lande also states that most 90-plus-day loans are already at the bailiff stage. Against that, its own reports acknowledge that recovery is slow, and at least one investor account describes a machinery case running roughly two years without resolution.

Are there fees for investors? Investing and selling on the secondary market are currently free. However, re:think P2P reported on 7 August 2026 that from 5 October 2026 Lande will charge an inactivity fee of €10 per month, rising to €50 per month after twelve months, on accounts holding idle cash with no new investments for a year. Confirm the current terms directly with Lande before assuming the platform is fee-free.

Bottom Line

Lande is one of the few licensed ways to lend against European farmland, and the fundamentals are more solid than the segment average: a verifiable Bank of Latvia authorisation, four years of published audited accounts, a profitable operator, 41% average LTV, and monthly reports that name real recovery cases. The reasons it sits mid-table rather than higher are structural and unresolved: no buyback, collateral agents that are Lande’s own subsidiaries with no consolidated audit over them, an Article 20 default disclosure whose arithmetic does not reproduce, slow enforcement on farm assets, and a service record on withdrawals that shows up repeatedly in reviews. Treat it as a diversifier sized for the possibility of a multi-year recovery, not as a core holding.

Affiliate disclosure. CrowdIndex earns a commission when readers sign up to platforms through links on this page. This does not affect our editorial assessment. Lande’s ranking on CrowdIndex is based on the editorial criteria documented on our Methodology page. We last reviewed this article on September 1, 2026.