The real deal behind the Bilt Rewards reboot

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[Update 9/21/2021: Listen to the free episode of the Manifesto here]

Like most folks who take travel hacking seriously, I was a bit bemused by the wave of coverage Bilt Rewards received back in June from Thought Followers in Travel and The Cocaine Guy alike. I didn’t write about it at the time, because it frankly didn’t look that interesting.

At launch, the basic conceit of the program was that you could pay your rent with a co-branded credit card. Then if you also hit other spend thresholds with that credit card, you would earn points on your rent payments as well as on those other purchases. You can check out the above-linked posts if you’re interested in the original program, but basically the whole thing was a mess.

When I saw on Twitter that Richard Kerr, a personal acquaintance and recently of Red Ventures, was involved, I decided to reach out and ask him to come on my podcast to talk about the program. He said he’d be happy to, but that he wanted to wait a month since they were rebooting the entire program in September. Well, it’s September, he came on the Manifesto, and he gave me the lowdown on the entirely-revamped program.

Bilt Rewards, Redux

The most important thing to get your head around with Bilt Rewards is that it’s not a credit card loyalty program. They want you to get their co-branded credit card, and the program isn’t particularly interesting unless you do, but in principle you can sign up for Bilt Rewards, plug in your landlord’s payment information, and pay through ACH from your checking account every month. They have a bunch of major residential real estate companies they can pay electronically but they’ll also cut a check if your landlord isn’t in their database, just like payment services like Plastiq. You’ll earn 250 Bilt Rewards points per month you pay your rent this way, and the whole thing is free.

Their credit card, a white-label World Elite MasterCard issued by Evolve Bank & Trust, is how you unlock the program’s potential value. It’s a no-annual-fee credit card that earns 2 points per dollar on travel and 3 points per dollar on dining, and 1 point per dollar everywhere else.

Oddly for a card designed to pay rent with, rent is the only category with capped earning, at 50,000 points per year, which works out to $4,167 in monthly rent. I assume that’s some kind of anti-abuse provision, so your spouse doesn’t write you a “lease” for $10,000 a month to live in your own home.

So what’s a Bilt Rewards point?

The whole point of this scheme is to rack up Bilt Rewards points, which can be transferred at a 1:1 ratio to their 9 travel partners:

  • American Airlines AAdvantage

  • Air Canada’s Aeroplan

  • Emirates Skywards

  • FlyingBlue

  • Turkish Miles & Smiles

  • Virgin Atlantic Flying Club

  • HawaiianMiles

  • World of Hyatt

  • IHG Rewards

American Airlines, Air Canada, and World of Hyatt are the most obviously valuable opportunities here, but there are sweet spots in each program that you might find personally appealing (and Richard was kind enough to list many of them on the Manifesto).

You can also redeem points for household stuff from their retail catalog or for money towards the down payment on a home.

Bilt Protect

One feature of the program so curious I had to send a follow-up e-mail to Richard about it after our interview is what they call “Bilt Protect.” This is a feature available to all Bilt Rewards credit cardholders, which allows rent payments to be debited from your linked checking account instead of charged to your credit card. According to my follow-up exchange with Richard, these transactions still earn 1 Bilt Rewards point per dollar, despite not flowing through the credit card at all.

If that’s correct, then anyone who rents can apply for a Bilt Rewards credit card, throw it in the sock drawer (although see below for transaction requirements), and still earn 1 point per dollar on their rent payments debited from their checking account.

As I said, I have this in writing from Richard, but if it is true the loophole seems yawning, if not cavernous.

Three more quibbles and quirks

There are a few more things to be aware of if you are at all interested in pursuing Bilt Rewards.

First, there’s a transaction requirement for credit cardholders. If you don’t make 5 transactions per statement cycle, you won’t earn any Bilt Rewards points at all. This is very dumb, but if you’re holding the credit card to earn points through Bilt Protect, be sure to throw 5 random charges on the credit card per month or you’ll earn nothing at all. Ideally, automate these through Plastiq, Amazon, or another recurring payment service.

Second, they have a funny “status” system which you should ignore completely. You can earn “interest” on your Bilt Rewards balance if you have “elite” status, but the interest rate is based on the national savings account interest rate, which is approximately 0.00%.

Finally, they’ve paid to upgrade the “basic” World Elite MasterCard with a suite of features I don’t know if I’ve seen recently on a no-annual-fee card, with trip delay protection and cell phone insurance being the two of most obvious interest.

Who is Bilt Rewards right for?

Let’s not mince words: these are very early days for the company, and we’re going to have to see how the program is managed, both on the outsourced credit card side and the in-house administrative side. They may burn through their venture capital quickly or slowly, they may attract a flood of customers or a trickle. In the startup world a surge of customers may make you a valuable acquisition target or unicorn IPO, or it may bankrupt you, so hopefully no readers will be building their travel strategy around Bilt Rewards any time soon.

But, there are obvious opportunities here. Since Citi fired me as a customer years ago, I don’t have any convenient method of earning American AAdvantage miles through credit card spend; if you’re in my position, this is a potential opening to transfer Bilt Rewards to AAdvantage. If you’re over the 5 cards per 24 month limit on Chase credit card approvals, you might not have easy access to World of Hyatt points — here’s a new one.

It also has a certain appeal as a “starter” card for folks renting their first apartment, with no annual fee and transfer partners in each alliance, plus Hyatt for hotel stays. Since Bilt Protect allows you to pay your rent from your checking account regardless of your credit limit, you could potentially run up a sizable rewards balance that way without paying any annual fees or risking falling into debt.

I work for you

As you know, nobody pays me for anything except my subscribers, Google Adsense, Amazon Associates, and the Milenomics Podcast Network, so you know Bilt Rewards didn’t pay me anything to write this. What they did do is give me a code to let you skip the “waiting list” and get instant access to the program. That code is: FQF4BILT. If you plug that in while signing up at biltrewards.com/waitlist, you should get instant access to the program. If not, let me know in the comments and I’ll bug Richard about fixing it, if he still talks to me after this post.