How a Bloomberg Administration Alum Launched a Renter Rewards Program

When Lily Liu and her family moved from Taiwan to Westchester County in the 1980s, finding an apartment in the suburbs that could accommodate them was a challenge.

After struggling to locate a rental while doubling up within their uncle’s home for nearly a year, they found a one-bedroom unit in Mount Kisco. Liu’s parents, herself and her older sister stayed there for several years and saved up enough to buy a home nearby, but their difficulty obtaining an apartment stayed with her for a long time.

“My parents were very frugal but they didn’t have a credit history. They didn’t know about it,” Liu said. “The ability to rent and come up with a down payment for a small unit was fundamental for allowing our family to create a financial footing, but it started with a lot of struggles coming here.”

Liu is the CEO and co-founder of Piñata, a 4-year-old proptech rewards program used by more than 1 million residential renters and 2,000 property management companies, designed to help tenants build up their credit scores while they pay their rent over time. 

For $5 a month, tenants can sign up for the app on their own, which will report their rental payment data to three major credit agencies. And corporate-owned residential complexes frequently offer the service as an amenity since their owners also get a range of perks.

But Liu designed the rewards program to fill a significant void in the personal finance world. 

Last year, 2.7 million people had their rental data reported in their credit files, which is only 3.5 percent of the 77 million renters nationwide, according to a FICO analysis. (Others say there are at least 100 million renters in the U.S.) It doesn’t help that landlords rarely report their tenants’ monthly payments to credit bureaus because there isn’t an easy way for them to do so.

More people than ever are choosing to rent instead of purchasing their homes, largely because of high mortgage rates and a historic undersupply of housing. The number of U.S. renter households rose 1.9 percent to a record 45.2 million in the second quarter of 2024, according to a Redfin analysis. Nearly half of those, or 22.4 million households, spent more than 30 percent of their income on their housing costs, according to a 2022 study by Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.  

All this means that renters’ dedication to making consistent recurring payments has been largely ignored by credit bureaus, which will affect the ability of these tenants to obtain a mortgage, purchase a car, or start a new business.

“You are credit invisible if you’ve never taken out a debt, loan, or built a trade line onto your credit history,” Liu said. “Typically these renters are younger renters or older ones with families, and we’re opening up that first trade line for them.” 

Not long ago, Liu herself was a tenant with a nascent credit history. The Carnegie Mellon University alum got a job managing special projects for the City of Long Beach, Calif., before she was recruited back to the East Coast to oversee several big data initiatives within the Bloomberg administration. By 2009, Liu had formed her first tech company, Public Stuff, which built one of the first online tools for local governments and companies that allowed residents to send real-time complaints about issues in their neighborhoods instead of calling 311. (One notable customer for the online system was the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest skyscraper.)  

For nearly a decade, Liu rented an apartment in New York. When she was finally ready to buy a home, she was shocked to learn her bank would not consider her stellar history of rent payments as it considered her mortgage application.

“I had on-time rent payment for the past nine years, I had references, and I remember the banker said, ‘I can’t use any of that,’ and I had a pretty lengthy conversation with him,” she said. “Logically, it doesn’t make sense. I paid rent on time every single month and could show that. It was eye-opening.”

The experience stayed with Liu when she pondered her next career move after her company was acquired by Accela and then merged with Berkshire Partners in 2017. One day she was on the phone catching up with her friend, entrepreneur Dimitri Falk. Talk turned to the challenges of the real estate market, and their idea began to blossom. 

“I loved Piñata’s mission of rewarding and giving renters the credit they deserve for their largest monthly expense,” said Falk, who became a Piñata co-founder. “It took someone with Lily’s expertise, determination and finesse to take an idea and turn it into a world-class product that a renter and landlord wouldn’t want to live without.”

Soon Liu recruited Clara Chow, another Bloomberg alum who worked in the city Economic Development Corporation, as she was leaving tax preparer Jackson Hewitt. 

Joining her longtime friend’s new startup was a “dream come true,” Chow said.

“Piñata was a way to build something that positively impacts millions of hard-working American renters while also being playful and delivering moments of surprise and delight,” she said. 

Together, Liu and Chow formed Piñata in 2020 with a pilot program of 40 management companies and launched the first paid version of the platform a year later. By January 2022, they had 500 property management companies and 200,000 renters. This was before they closed a $13 million Series A round led by proptech venture firm Wilshire Lane Capital.

Even though many investors were hesitant to take financial risks during the COVID-19 pandemic, Liu realized that real estate owners wanted cost-effective ways to improve their amenities to keep tenants happy as they moved out of major cities or sought larger spaces that accommodated working from home. 

“There was a lot of tension the first year between landlords and renters over whether rent was paid on time,” she said. “People who were previously on time would constantly be weeks late, and that affected owners’ cash flow.”

The membership program rapidly grew popular with tenants who could earn myriad rewards in addition to building their credit scores. By making on-time rental payments, tenants can collect points that reside in a digital wallet and can go toward gift cards for home furnishings, savings on groceries and other basic expenses, and entry into raffles for a month of free rent or home makeovers with CB2 or West Elm. Last year, they launched Piñata Pay, a debit card and bank account for renters that includes credit card-style rewards tied to rental payments.

Owners get plenty of benefits, too. Piñata says its technology has led to a 15 percent increase in on-time rental payments for property managers while also resulting in less turnover for apartments. The platform provides an insurance program for owners, reduces maintenance costs by helping tenants make small repairs such as changing air filters, and assists tenants in subsidized units with their recertification paperwork when it comes time to renew their leases.

So far, apartment owners have been pleased with the service. Courtney Curto, a property manager whose company manages 1,500 single-family rentals across Central Florida, signed up for the service after learning at a real estate conference about how it could build her residents’ credit future. And Chris Vincent, a broker associate for Missouri-based Hunter Property Management, said his company enrolled in Piñata to justify their resident benefit package.

“We were looking for additional value that we could bring to our residential tenants above and beyond just the house,” he said. “The value it brings outweighs the cost, which is always a great scenario.”

Liu moved back to Los Angeles with her husband and three children several years ago, but she is renting again after the Palisades Fire made her home uninhabitable. She has started to think more about the economics of renting as more Americans eschew homeownership.

“We feel safer using capital outside of real estate investments right now, given the ability to invest in other places is more straightforward now than it has ever been,” she said. “With rates as high as they are, it just makes sense for us to be a renter right now.”