Any other renters being urged by your landlords to sign up for the new “Bilt” renters loyalty rewards program? Basically giving free points towards travel/amazon shopping/future rent/down payment. Seems too good to be true to me and another point program headache taking your personal information and selling it to third parties. Creepiest part I skimmed from the terms & conditions was this:
Telephone monitoring
● You agree that Bilt and its third party service providers may listen to and record telephone calls
as part of providing Program services.
Basically you need to install the Bilt app to your phone to participate. I’m planning on calling my front office tomorrow to ask what the catch is and why they decided to join this program and how it benefits “them”.
…or just sandbox the app and don’t let it whatever
The primary benefit of paying rent would be that you get the place to live.
I have no idea what your landlord gets out of it? Is it a larger management company you’re renting from? Maybe they have some deals going on it the background… in which case, just sandbox the app if you like the place.
It is a management company for my complex. It is optional and you can still pay via check/online withdraw and all the previous options. But they are are trying to promote this as a great program to opt into.
Just seems to me that Bilt must be profiting off of this in some way be it personal data collection and info about your finances if they are partnering up with apartments.
I suspect this is just an integration of the same “use our credit card get points” scheme with the rental market, and I suspect “download the app” is just marketing code speak for “open an account with us”.
Every time you use their card, there’s various processing fees (a percentage) charged to the merchant for accepting the credit card, the points (either from rent) are there to incentivize you to use their card instead of some other.
It doesn’t sounds like you’re losing anything by applying (except maybe you get paper spam in the mail), but it doesn’t sound like youre winning anything without actually using points.
e.g. if for every $1 of rent you pay you get 1 point to transfer to an airline or a hotel group that probably requires 100k points to be able to jump the queue on check-in, or something like that … it’s just not very useful / nor is it worth the hassle.
Instead, look at cards that give you cashback or cards that give you things like gadget insurance (for you know, when your $1000 phone drops out of your stuffed winter jacked pocket and onto concrete, … that might be worth $10-$15 a month - if this kind of thing’s ever happened to you).
