Bilt’s Rollout Mess
Tl;dr: Despite offering some of the most valuable rewards on the market, Bilt has made a mess of its 2.0 launch with poor messaging, confusing changes, execution failures, and hard-to-use benefits. Can they regain trust before customers give up?
When Bilt announced their 2.0 card lineup, I was pleasantly surprised. When the transition happened on February 7th, I just switched on the “point accelerator” to earn 3x Bilt points on my spending and forgot about it. My transition to the new cards was smooth and a big upgrade for my wallet.
Alas, not everyone has had the same experience. LazyPoints’ Chief Design Officer (/my wife) has been trying to set up housing rewards, and the experience has been rocky at best. And she is not alone. Many people have run into difficulties with Bilt’s transition to a new issuer, refreshed rewards system, and updated process for housing payments.
How did it get so bad? Should we be worried? Can Bilt fix it — profitably?
Not-so-lazy points
Bilt burst onto the scene offering “the best way to get rewarded on the biggest life expenses starting with rent. No coupon stuff with random companies.” And they delivered with the no-fee Bilt 1.0 Mastercard: swipe the card five times per statement period, pay rent via ACH or check, earn 1x on rent up to 100k annually. Done.
While it was great for customers, it wasn’t great for the bank issuing the credit card, Wells Fargo. The bank was reportedly losing $10 million per month as customers racked up rewards without generating enough money through interest or other fees to cover the rewards. So, Wells Fargo backed out of the contract early and Bilt switched to Cardless, hoping to offer a product that was both competitive and profitable.
To do this, they launched “the most complicated rewards system we’ve ever seen,” according to the New York Times. In addition to earning points, spending now generates “Bilt Cash,” which can be converted indirectly into points via housing payments or used toward other redemptions — often with limits or restrictions. As a result, Bilt’s big launch turned into headlines like “The Bilt 2.0 Blunder” or “Bilt 2.0 Promises Rewards, Delivers Confusion.”
Failures of communication
The ability to earn points on rent was Bilt’s core value proposition, and the company excited many by promising to launch points on not just rent but mortgages with Bilt 2.0, offering rewards on housing for even more people. But as the Bilt 2.0 launch date drew near, it wasn’t clear how this would work.
Despite floating Bilt 2.0 nearly a year earlier, in the weeks leading up to the new cards’ launch — when existing cardholders could choose to switch to a new card, and new customers could start applying — Bilt still hadn’t offered much in the way of explanation of what was in store. Rumors and leaks started to fill the void, including a basically accurate one, and people started to fear that fee-free points on rent would be going away. Bilt wouldn’t confirm the leaks, but assured customers that said customers would “always have the option to make your full rent or mortgage payment seamlessly through Bilt and without a transaction fee.”
Launch day came, and–just as the leaks described–the cards were advertised as earning both points and “Bilt Cash.” One problem: Bilt hadn’t fully explained what Bilt Cash was or how it could be used. Meanwhile, people noticed that Bilt was offering the option to pay cash (actual money!) to earn Bilt points on rent. And one of the few things Bilt was clear on was that the Bilt Cash could be used to earn points on rent — by paying a transaction fee.
Bilt quickly backtracked and eliminated the option to pay a cash transaction fee. But there was a bigger backtrack: just two days after launching, Bilt launched a new, alternative rewards system — one without any Bilt Cash — leaving people to try to work out which of two different systems might be best for them.
And that would be difficult, because Bilt didn’t release redemption options and limits for Bilt Cash until a week after the cards were announced and five days after Bilt’s CEO announced the alternate system. And when that announcement came, the system included a ton of coupons and a harsh expiration policy: all but $100 in Bilt Cash would expire at the end of the year, no matter when earned.
Meanwhile, people started checking the fine print and noticing things like certain spending being excluded from rewards and a downgrade in rental car protection — whereas the old, no-fee card had primary insurance, even the $495-fee Palladium card now had secondary insurance. People also wondered if Bilt’s “Rent Day” tradition of double points on the first of each month would continue, and Bilt had no answers–until confirming nearly two weeks later that it would continue through 2026.
Many a Bilt customer during the transition
The transition goes awry
Bilt didn’t make their lives easier by promising a “seamless transition.”
Some existing customers got unexpected denials, while some who were approved saw their credit limits decrease significantly. For new customers, Bilt initially and very briefly offered an elevated offer via The Points Guy (TPG), and then wouldn’t honor it (and then changed their minds again). Meanwhile, some customers who declined to keep their old Wells Fargo account got unwanted Wells Fargo cards anyway. Some who applied for Bilt cards, meanwhile, saw delivery delays of the physical cards.
Those who stuck with Bilt through all this then faced challenges in actually using them. Some customers found their cards were frozen–including some who needed to make purchases right away to take advantage of that TPG offer. Meanwhile, Bilt’s housing payment systems started failing, as it identified housing payments as non-housing, resulting in rejections.
For my wife, setting up housing payments has been a major headache. First off, to use BillPay to pay your mortgage, you have to pay manually each month. There’s no autopay option (as far as we can tell); a recipe for a disastrous missed payment. In the alternative, if you want to use an ACH number to pay, as in Bilt 1.0, you’ll need to choose “Pay Manually” and “Online rent payment portal” in the Bilt app–two options conspicuously lacking the term “ACH.” And the mortgage company's online portal didn’t accept Bilt’s ACH number, although it eventually worked after calling the bank. Not exactly seamless, or reassuring. And we use different bank accounts for credit card and mortgage payments, but Bilt won’t let us use different accounts for different payments.
Slippery benefits
As if all that isn’t enough, at times it seems like some of Bilt 2.0’s key benefits are practically designed for breakage — revenue “earned” when customers can’t take advantage of promised benefits.
The most obvious culprit here is Bilt Cash. The currency is a big part of Bilt’s new value proposition, but it has a hard expiration policy–you can only roll up to $100 into the new calendar year, regardless of how much you’ve accumulated. Although not everyone will accumulate big sums of Bilt Cash, those who do risk missing out on its value if they have too much at the end of the year. That’s a pretty large risk, too, considering that the expiration comes just after the holiday shopping season. And the expiration is particularly harsh on Obsidian cardholders who want to use the “point accelerator” to earn an extra point per dollar spent on their cards; if they roll over $100 Bilt Cash, they will have to spend $2,500 in the new year before they have enough to activate the accelerator.
The other big culprit is the Obsidian and Palladium hotel credits. They only apply to two-night stays, which are harder to use than credits that apply to any stay. You have to specifically apply the credit during checkout–forget to do that, and you could lose it. You have to use one in each half of the year–January to June, and July to December–so if you have an extended period with minimal travel, you might not be able to use it. Plus, the credit is triggered at payment (checkout) for non-prepaid bookings. If you plan to use a credit for a hotel stay for, say, Thanksgiving, and have to cancel at the last minute, you’ll only have about a month to use the credit before it expires.
Another issue is the point accelerator. This allows you to use $200 Bilt Cash to earn an extra Bilt point per dollar spent on the next $5000 in spending. But there’s no indication that Bilt will give you any heads up when you reach that limit, let alone let you seamlessly re-apply that benefit. While the point accelerator could let you earn 3 points per dollar on up to $25,000 in spending in theory, in reality some of those points could leak away. Worse, the benefit expires at the end of the calendar year. If you use up an accelerator towards the end of the year, you might have to choose between giving up the easy bonus point or spending $200 in Bilt Cash but earning far less than the 5,000 potential Bilt Points on that investment.
Meanwhile, Bilt’s fee-free housing rewards (non-Bilt Cash) are full of breakage risk. If your spending falls short of 25% of your housing payment, you’ll get only 250 points. And because housing rewards kick in at fixed spending thresholds (25, 50, 75, and 100+% of housing payments), the total return on your spending is highest at each of those thresholds, significantly lower just below them, and also progressively lower when you spend more. In fact, once you start spending significantly more on your card than your housing payment, you can lose a great deal of value compared to Bilt’s other rewards options.
Finally, some credits have complicated fine print. The $10 monthly Lyft credit expires at the end of the month it is redeemed, according to the terms. Activate it at the end of the month for a ride and then plans change (or an Uber is cheaper) and you can’t use it? That Bilt Cash is gone; a $0 value. The $10 Walgreens credit is better – you get 30 days to use it. But it’s not a simple statement credit that reimburses you for your Walgreens purchase. It’s a digital gift card that you have to remember to redeem at checkout. This increases friction, complication, and the risk that you might not be able to use it before it expires.
Is this even sustainable?
While some customers may be disappointed with Bilt 2.0 for all these reasons, at the same time, the cards provide such incredible value that I find it hard to understand how Bilt can make this all work.
Obviously, it’s hard for a credit card to provide point-per-dollar rewards on housing. Wells Fargo was losing a lot of money under Bilt 1.0, and Mesa’s attempt to reward mortgages with $1,000 in minimum card spend didn’t pan out.
Bilt has moved away from that model to one that ties housing rewards more linearly to spending — but at that point, it’s just rewards on card spending with extra, complicated steps. With the Bilt Palladium, points per dollar spent on the card range from roughly 2-4x depending on how you execute those steps. But generally speaking, credit cards tend to be profitable around 1x rewards, break even around 2x, and lose money above that. With Palladium effectively delivering 2–4x, something has to give.
Bilt has some wiggle room because they have a business beyond just credit cards, which is profitable, and they have raised tons of money from investors. But at some point the credit card model has to work. That might mean devaluations, inefficient redemptions, or so much complexity that customers leave value on the table.
How Bilt could improve
Bilt has already done multiple major program changes in just the first few weeks of Bilt 2.0, and I don’t think more structural changes would make anyone any happier. But a few things could put people’s minds more at ease and make them more willing to experiment and engage with Bilt’s ecosystem:
Guarantee that housing payments will be processed correctly. Something like “if our system fails and you miss a payment, we’ll make it right.”
Allow users to use different bank accounts for different payments.
Switch from a hard, end-of-year expiration for Bilt Cash to a soft one. For instance, 2026 Bilt Cash could expire at the end of February or March 2027, or Bilt Cash could be valid for 6 or 12 full months after it is earned.
Apply the hotel credits and similar Bilt Cash redemptions like the Walgreens credit automatically as statement credits — if you have a qualifying purchase, you should get the credit, regardless of what you do during checkout.
Offer some form of hotel credit recovery. For example, a minimum three-month period to re-use a credit if you book a qualifying refundable stay through Bilt and later cancel.
Improve the point accelerator. Send an automatic notification when an activation expires. Allow users to enable auto-renewal on the point accelerator if they have sufficient Bilt Cash when an activation expires. And allow an activation to continue into the following year, at least for a month or two (or offer a prorated Bilt Cash refund).
Lazy Take 🦥
Even if Bilt 2.0 is not as uniquely rewarding as its predecessor, it’s still an opportunity for incredible value — one that may not last forever. I still think the Palladium is the best card on the market, but Bilt hasn’t made it easy to recommend, let alone to explain.
If they can’t simplify and explain the value structure more clearly, avoid alienating customers who can’t micromanage their accounts, and provide the basic execution of things like mortgage payments that are central to Bilt’s identity, it will be hard to retain and acquire customers, no matter how rewarding the cards could be.