Ankur Jain

Expansion has defined the last 12 months for Bilt Rewards, an economic platform for renters and owners designed to make it rewarding — literally — to pay the rent and mortgage. 

Bilt was founded six years ago, and today some 25 percent of apartment buildings in the U.S. are signed on with the New York-based company, according to CEO Ankur Jain.

“The original vision [was to] make housing more rewarding,” Jain said. “It’s people’s biggest expense: your rent, your mortgage payments. So we asked, ‘How do we turn that into a truly world-class customer experience?’ ”

Over the last 12 months, Bilt’s platform hosted $100 billion in just housing payments.

“It started with rewards for paying your rent or mortgage on time, and, as part of that, we built an entire membership and resident app platform for property managers,” Jain said. “So property managers and mortgage servicers today use Bilt to unify the fragmented systems they have on the resident experience.”

But members don’t just get rewards for paying their rent and mortgages on time anymore. This year the company expanded its rewards program into the neighborhoods where its residents live, work and play. 

In March, Bilt launched Bilt Hospitality, a platform for restaurants that streamlines the reservation, payment and other separate aspects of restaurant management, while still providing Bilt members with the rewards and a more connected neighborhood experience.

In April, Bilt announced it was expanding Bilt Hospitality to travel advisers, and this September Bilt announced a partnership with Amtrak that turns housing payments into train reward points. 

“I would summarize our last year in two parts,” Jain said. “One has been expanding our membership program across housing, so we now have scaled massively, obviously, on the residential apartment building side. And, then, on the neighborhood side the last 12 months has been an explosion.”