My landlord has decided to help himself to another $100 a month next year because "all the reasons" they usually list.
He bought a very bad property, for twice what it may have been worth, at high interest, and it's falling apart and requiring expensive fixes, however the other landlords in the area charge what they charge and that's at least keeping a lid on his ambitions for now.
Anyway, he's finally become enough of a nuisance (although many who have read what I think about mortgages and the TCO would know by now that those don't solve any problem I have, they'd just make it $4,000 a month instead of $1100).
My question is this. I saw a lot of people claiming BILT gives you 1% back on rent, but the site I read about it on says 1 point per dollar, and as a statement credit or applied to rent, it only values the points at 0.55 cents per point, which means that if my rent is $1100, I'd on't get back $5.50 a month in actual value from this card. From there, I have to deduct the assumption that I'd need to tell BILT to charge the rent and send the check on the 15th, even though I usually send mine in the mail on the 22nd or so, and pay out of a Money Market Savings Account.
I'm getting about 16 cents per day in bank interest that the check is outstanding. I cannot control when he cashes it, but it has to be there by the first, even though he often doesn't cash them until the 9th, he has a nasty habit of suing and evicting people who don't get theirs in on time. I know the mail runs about 4-5 days because he has cashed them that fast before.
Assuming that I mail the check on the 22nd and it takes about 5 days, I have at least 80 cents interest while it's in the mail, and in reality I usually have another $1.60 or so by the time he gets around to it.
If the value of the BILT points would only be $5.50, then we can deduct the price of postage on the letters and add back in $1.20 in bank interest by writing checks, which means the card would only net me $4.30 a month, or about $51.60 a year.
It's something but it is not a lot. Probably not enough to bother with. Certainly not enough to deal with the BILT Alliance, which apparently(?) includes Equity Residential, a company that has spawned some investigative journalism for (iirc) running hedge fund apartment complexes that sell investors on the fact that they can take working class people and just keep jacking up the rent, so this appears to be a company that's causing a lot of problems for us renters in the first place, which is telling us we can have pennies back if we barrage our landlord with garbage about joining their platform?
Maybe not such an attractive deal.
This sounds to me suspiciously like another RealPage. Which told landlords, essentially, "Sure you'll price a lot of them out of their homes, but think of all the money you'll make on the rest."
This narrowminded shortsightedness is why my landlord keeps having to take people who can't pay him anymore to eviction court. I don't know if he's listening to one of these "algorithms" but he's now got a 25% vacancy rate here and there's another garbage pile his workers throw in the lawn from an evicted tenant almost every month. He can't see that an unrented apartment generates nothing while his mortgage stays the same.
The city has been after this guy repeatedly and from the garbage piles to the broken sewage pump, he gets it all working again the day before the inspection.
Also, if he isn't getting any funny idea from the algorithms, I don't want to clue him in.
Anyway, I just don't see the point in these BILT points. If I've gotten anything wrong here, please correct me. I love being corrected by well informed people.
Anyway, the way I'm seeing this, There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. Not with BILT, and not with housing. Renting or "buying" (over thirty years).
(If the tree that fell on this place fell over and hit a house I "owned", I would have costs, calling the insurance company, getting it evaluated, watching my premiums soar at the next renewal. Calling it "rent" and spreading the pain around is just another way things even out.)
tl;dr
So really I'd only get 0.4% or so from rent, and that's if I did all the stuff I needed to do to qualify and then possibly spammed my landlord with BILT ads that encourage him to raise our rent.
