Surely, the human arsenal is expansive enough to fit a lot of valuable elements, but truth be told, it still doesn’t have anything more valuable than our tendency to grow on a consistent basis. This tendency, in particular, has allowed us to hit upon some huge milestones, with technology appearing as a unique member of the stated squad. The reason why technology’s credentials are so anomalous is largely down to its skill-set, which ushered us towards a reality that we couldn’t have imagined otherwise. Nevertheless, if we look beyond the surface, it will become clear how the whole runner was also very much predicated upon the way we utilized those skills across a real-world setting. The latter component was, in fact, what gave the creation a spectrum-wide presence, and consequentially, kickstarted a tech revolution. This revolution, like we discovered later, will go on to scale up the human experience from every conceivable direction, but even after achieving such a monumental feat, technology will somehow continue producing all the right goods. This has turned more and more evident on the back of our recent progression, and if anything, a new funding should only make that dynamic bigger and better moving forward.
Bilt Rewards, a company which works with some of the country’s largest multifamily owners and operators to create loyalty programs and a co-branded credit card for property renters, has successfully secured over $150 million in growth capital, and it has done so at a whopping $1.5 billion valuation. Led by Left Lane Capital, the round saw further participation coming from the likes of Wells Fargo, Greystar, Invitation Homes, Camber Creek, Fifth Wall, Smash Capital, Prosus Ventures and Kairos. Launched in 2021, Bilt Rewards has incentivized rent payments by offering points on every transaction. Once collected, these points can then be redeemed across 12 different loyalty programs, including major airlines, hotels, travel, fitness classes, Amazon purchases, credit toward rent or a future downpayment. However, the company’s objective is much bigger than just rent payments. To contextualize the statement, we must unpack its newly-announced brainchild named Bilt Homes. Bilt Homes takes your monthly rent payment into account, and by treating it as a marker, the service shows you homes in your area that you can actually own for the same amount of money. This amount is made up from real-time interest rates, taxes, income, credit profile and other personal data so to determine mortgage qualification. The relevant platform even allows you to calculate whether you need a mortgage in the first place, and if you do, it shows how an improvement in credit rating will affect your recommended mortgage interest rate.
“It’s an opportunity for more renters to think about whether homeownership is the right thing for them at this moment in time,” said Ankur Jain, founder and CEO of Bilt. “It’s just so stupidly confusing to buy a home today, so we created the first tool where you can now just say, for $3,000 a month, what are the homes that I could buy today for the same amount?”
To this date, Bilt has already processed over $3.5 billion in annualized rent payments and over $1.6 billion in annualized card spend to date, while serving over half a million customers between the loyalty program and credit card. The company’s loyalty program was even deemed as the most valuable rewards currency of 2022 by BankRate.