not that surprising if you think about it. banks do exactly the same thing and bilt is a simply a 3rd party version of it. banks have access to the same info (i guess people are more ok because it's the banks) and use it to generate more income. they also have merchant offers and other promos. the difference is banks tend to work with bigger merchants, which will be applicable to many people regardless of location, while bilt work with neighborhood merchants that are mostly appliacble to people near them. the latter is alot less scalable because they have to recuit their merchants one by one. and in my case, bilt has zero merchants near me, not even dining even though there are tons of restaurants within 20mins by foot from where i lived

Has anyone else seen extremely aggressive Wells Fargo purchase checks recently? Seems like every other online order I attempt using my Bilt triggers the WF "making sure it's you" prompt, requiring me to log into my app to confirm a purchase. Half the time I confirm and it errors out anyways.

With the release of the new Alaska Atmos Summit higher tier card, it'd be interesting to see if Bilt Rewards will treat it like the lower tier Alaska card for rent payments via Bilt.

The company rep on Reddit confirmed that they will.

im thinking if i would reapply for the bilt card when time comes. my annual rent + utilities are about 40k and i easily have at least another 20k foreign insurance spend (a lot more if i pay for my family). this gives me 180k as miles + a 25k and 100k companion voucher (so essentially 305k as miles) for a cost of ~1.6k (1.2k in fees for paying rent and 395 in af) with the new atos summit card. i believe i would also at least get as gold or ows if i wanted to, but it doesnt really factor into my consideration. if i use bilt card + vx, i currently get 90k points for net 95 af. assuming that points are roughly equal in value, that is 215k points for 1.5k, or 0.698cpm. this figure improves with more spend, and i could always pay for my family's insurance spend (since credit cards dont earn points for insurance spend in my home country) and have quite a bit of foreign travel spend that dont belong under categories with bonus multipliers

FYI, the Bilt app isn't recognizing the Summit card (yet) as an eligible card for the 3 miles for 3% rent spend yet. The old Visa Signature still shows up OK. I don't know how long it will take them to update. But just a heads up in case folks were planning to knock out the minimum spend early via rent payments. If anyone else was planning to pay rent on the Summit stat (like me), I recommend contacting Bilt Support so more support tickets will hopefully get their attention and get them to fix the app sooner.

EDIT: This issue was addressed in September and all eligible Bilt rent payments should be correctly posting with the 3X Atmos multiplier.

How is that math mathing?

40k rent and 20k foreign spend are 3x, so 180k miles. companion vouchers are worth 100+25k miles, so a total of 305k miles

As a family traveler, I can cherry pick redemptions to get ~2cpp so paying the 3% fee is a mathematical win, plus being able to amass tons of pts and status helps with allowing to do big trips often.
I foresee having issues with maximizing the 100k voucher because we don't usually book one ways that cost that much per person, so this would force us to book roundtrips for 4, which I don't do often.

Anyway, I think there are is much more value with the summit card (SUB, status earning, vouchers, 3x pts, lounge access) that getting a bilt card instead makes little sense.

I tried my September Bilt rent payment with the Atmos Summit hoping that things may just work out on the backend but I did not receive the advertised 3 miles per $ benefit. I just got 0.5 Bilt per $ points for the 3% fee. Bilt says this is an Alaska and BoA issue and to take it up with them. Fair warning.

I'll try to get Alaska's attention on this because they've been advertising this benefit since the Atmos program launch.

i kept getting this email from bilt "Action required: Complete your BillPay setup". and they called me 3 times in total. i have already done it with the agent the first they called. im not sure what else they want from me at this point. between this and bilt probably requiring me to reapply next year, it is becoming more and more of an hassle

Following up on this, here's the letter I received from Wells Fargo:

Subject: Closure of your credit card account ending in XXXX

Periodically we review our customers' accounts with us to ensure that the use of each account continues to meet our guidelines. We recently found your credit card account no longer meets our lending requirements based on a suspicious payment or account activity, or money that we could not collect. As a result, we're closing your card account as of the date of this letter, and providing important information to help you prepare for the changes.

What is changing and steps to take
* Please continue to make at least the minimum monthly payment for any outstanding balance. You can pay your balance in full at any time without penalty.
* You can no longer use this account for purchases or cash advances. Safely dispose of all associated cards and SUPERCHECKS
* If you set up automatic bill payments using this card, please cancel or change them to another card account.
* If you have a rewards account, it may have been closed and any unredeemed rewards associated with this credit card account may have been forfeited, except where prohibited by law.
* Any optional features linked to this account have been canceled. This includes overdraft protection.

BILT is going to be fine. The statistics are that they have deals to be the rent portal for something like a quarter of US apartment buildings. I don't know if their current valuation makes sense, but they have revenue streams beyond the card.

Unless they did something really stupid like take stake in funding rewards for the card, but it'd be beyond reckless after seeing how much of a bath WF took. That's why BILT was able to stick their tongue out to wells and say no changes... WF funded rewards, including rent rewards. Until WF threatened to place a $250 - $300 AF on the card at least.

I heard of a lot of issues with the switchover of the BillPay from Evolve routing numbers to Column NA and the authorization of rent requirement.

Others have already stated it, but new cards are coming in February for BILT, and Cardless/First Electronic Bank may be unwilling or unable to take over the portfolio from WF. In particular WF may demand that Cardless/FEB buy out the BILT portfolio face value or at a discount - which they may not be able to absorb (portfolio too large), unwilling to take on the risk of the portfolio, or both. F.E.B. only has a net revenue of $26 million a year... there is not room for them to make a Wells Fargo sized error of losing $10M USD/mo on a single product.

(That's also a huge argument as to why a major nerf in the product is inevitable, spun as a win by CEO Ankur Jain... decreased general rent rewards, higher minimum transactions/spend, some increases in affiliated BILT merchant discounts, to say that the cards are more rewarding for "those who engage with BILT's ecosystem the most.)

Anyways, I wouldn't lose sleep over it. Wait and see what happens.

I'm just glad I got in when I did and a little sorry I didn't do it sooner. $10K in tax payments at 2 Hyatt points per dollar effectively was a fantastic deal. Less than a penny a point. And Platinum Bilt status and milestone rewards along the way.

It's a reminder, to me, to make sure to get in early once a deal looks solid.

Is anybody paying rent with a different card, like Alaska or Double Cash and 3% fee? Do you know what's the MCC for such transaction? Thanks.