I remember getting a credit card in my mid-20's and being excited to earn airline points.

And I thought I could rack up even more points if I paid my rent with my credit card.

After all, I lived in New York City and rent was by far my biggest expense.

But I was quickly disappointed.

Disappointed, but you should not have been surprised.

That's our colleague Anna Maria Andriotis, who's an expert on credit cards.

And that is because landlords generally do not accept credit cards for rent payments.

That's pretty much been, I guess almost like an unspoken rule in the real estate industry among landlords big and small that credit cards are not

accepted. The reason they're not accepted is because merchants typically have to pay a

two or three percent fee on every credit card transaction.

Why would any landlord, big or small, accept a rent payment that is even a few percentage points less than what they're

charging their tenants. So this has been something that some of the largest

payments companies in the US have struggled with for decades.

How do they make in roads to get this large expense that so many people have every month.

A few years ago, a company called Build said it could do the impossible.

It was going to allow people to pay rent with a credit card,

earn points along the way, and get landlords to go along with it. Can you just like take me to the moment

that Bill launched, and do you remember that moment and what did you think?

I remember being skeptical and constantly asking

But what landlord would accept fees I don't understand that's just the model how

would that work and then being told that landlords would not have to pay fees and then I'm thinking to myself well wait a minute

that just throws this big sort of question mark around the entire credit card model

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