The news: A new rewards card for mortgage payments, the Made Card, launched in partnership with Fairway Home Mortgage, per a press release.

Issued by Lead Bank, the Made Card has no annual fee and offers the following rewards categories:

• 1x points for mortgage payments, including taxes, HOA fees, and escrow
• 2x points for home improvements, home maintenance, and furniture
• 3x points on everyday essentials like gas, groceries, utilities, and EV charging
• 1x points on all other purchases

How we got here: The Bilt Card’s launch with Wells Fargo in 2022 reset consumer expectations for housing-related rewards. While the card was popular with consumers, the economics of the cards made it deeply unprofitable for its issuer:

• Wells was hit with losses as steep as $10 million a month as Bilt structured its card so that landlords were insulated from paying fees on rent payments. 
• Renters likewise were slow to pull out their Bilt Cards beyond housing payments.

However, the popularity of earning rewards for rent and mortgage payments stuck with consumers, cracking the door for rivals to create a better formula than Bilt to serve the same industry. Bilt itself is gearing up to relaunch a tiered credit card program for rent and mortgage payments.

Our take: The Made Card’s expanded rewards tiers could help train consumers to make the card top-of-wallet for all housing concerns. However, it still needs to convince the same segment of US adults to choose its product over Bilt’s new refresh with Cardless—a tough sell as 1 million US adults already count themselves as Bilt members. 

Pitching its product to first-time homeowners may help lock young adults on the pathway to ownership into their ecosystem, especially as Bilt captures more of the rental market. But even more importantly, it will also need to convince a critical mass of mortgage servicers not to charge acceptance fees that would wipe out any gains consumers get from the rewards.