With the announcement comes a national distribution partnership with Fairway Home Mortgage, one of the largest retail mortgage originators in the country, Made Card said in a Thursday (Nov. 20) news release.
“Mortgages and credit cards are the two most important financial products most consumers will ever use, but they’ve never worked together,” Made Card co-founder and CEO Ashin Shah said in the release. “Traditional rewards cards have long focused on travel and luxury perks, but for most households, those rewards feel out of reach or irrelevant.”
Christophe Van, the company’s other co-founder, said in the release that Made Card takes a different tack, “transforming everyday home expenses like mortgages and home improvement into meaningful financial relief and using the credit card as the foundation for a smarter platform to manage spending, saving and running a home.”
The card offers homeowners rewards for making on-time mortgage payments, plus exclusive perks like twice-yearly preventative maintenance visits by certified HVAC technicians, according to the release.
The company is also updating its mobile app to include artificial intelligence-enabled home journal and concierge chatbot functionalities, “designed to simplify and enhance the homeowner experience,” the release said.
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The new offering came as the United States’ toughest housing market in a generation has “transformed homeownership from an asset milestone into a budgeting challenge,” as PYMNTS wrote in October.
The PYMNTS Intelligence report “The Adjustable-Rate Reckoning: How Homeownership Is Pushing Millions Paycheck to Paycheck” found that 14% of consumers living paycheck to paycheck point to homeownership as the reason they’re stretched thin, representing over 24 million Americans.
Rising prices, adjustable-rate mortgages (ARMs) and stalled wages are driving even high-income households toward financial fragility.
While home prices have more than doubled since the 2008 economic crisis, reaching an average of $416,900 in the first quarter of this year, household incomes have barely moved. Bankrate estimates a buyer now needs a household income of $116,986 to afford the median property, an almost 50% increase over the space of five years.
