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This new credit card rewards mortgage payments. Should you join the waitlist?

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Published on December 19, 2024 | 4 min read

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Credit card rewards can offer significant value for savvy consumers. Unfortunately, most homeowners aren’t earning any rewards at all on one of their biggest monthly expenses: their mortgage.

Enter the Mesa Homeowners Card, a new credit card designed specifically for homeowners. The Mesa Card earns points on monthly mortgage payments, as well as bonus rewards on home-related and everyday purchases. The card’s benefits are also built with homeowners in mind — and all of it for $0 in annual fees.

The card almost sounds too good to be true. Is there a catch? We dove into what we know about the Mesa Card and asked for a personal finance expert’s take on it. We’ll withhold further judgment until more details are publicly available, but it’s an interesting offer nonetheless.

What we like: rewards and benefits for homeowners

The key feature of the Mesa credit card is its rewards system. According to a recent press release, the card earns:

  • 1X points on monthly mortgage payments — linked through the Mesa app
  • 2X points on everyday essentials, such as grocery, gas, and EV charging
  • 3X points on home-related purchases, including HOA fees, home insurance, home improvement, decor, maintenance, utilities and more
  • 1X points on all other purchases

You can link any mortgage by connecting your bank account to the Mesa app. That means you don’t actually have to put your mortgage on a credit card to earn rewards. This allows you to avoid paying for debt with debt — a scenario personal finance experts tend to caution people strongly against.

You can redeem Mesa Points for statement credits, gift cards, travel and, perhaps most interestingly, mortgage payments.

The Mesa Card also provides benefits tailored to homeowners, which is a unique proposition. These include credits toward pet-related purchases and home improvement service, big-box memberships and home warranty benefits, according to a Mesa spokesperson. A more comprehensive list of benefits isn’t currently publicly available, unfortunately.

The rewards and benefits make the Mesa Card a highly innovative product targeting a highly specific audience.

“This new offering plays into the trend of hyper-specific credit cards aimed at tapping into pain points that so many Americans are facing,” says Bobbi Rebbell, certified financial planner and founder of Financial Wellness Strategies, a financial education firm.

What we don’t like: lack of transparency

Before you get excited and download the Mesa app or join the waitlist, consider a few potential downfalls.

First, you don’t really know what you’re getting into. The information available online about this rewards card is minimal. I had to reach out to Mesa to gather more details for this story but was only able to get a few. The credit card industry is extremely regulated, and such lack of clarity on the terms made me wary. Why so secretive?

The full list of benefits and their conditions isn’t available to the public. Neither are the redemption rates. A Schumer box, which tells you about APR and fees associated with the card, is nowhere to be found. I can’t say I’ve encountered a credit card product quite so shrouded in mystery in my five years as a financial journalist.

The rewards system is also not without its quirks. For example, mortgage payments yield 1X points and other home-related expenses, such as HOA fees and home insurance, 3X points. But if you’re one of many people who has these expenses included in your monthly mortgage payment, the Mesa app won’t recognize it. You’d only get 1X points on the entirety of your payment.

Further, if you’re an Android user interested in the Mesa credit card, you’re out of luck. Currently, the Mesa app is only available in the Apple Store. However, according to the company’s website, that will change soon.

What we’re unsure about: the card’s future

It looks like the Mesa credit card has garnered a lot of interest: the waitlist exists because the demand is high, the Mesa spokesperson said.

“The venture will likely increase brand awareness and amplify brand loyalty because it hits so close to home (pun intended!)” Rebbell says.

For such a young company, this is crucial. Mesa was founded in 2023 and launched its card product and a mortgage marketplace in September 2024. The Mesa credit card is an ambitious product — but will it survive in the long run?

The card is a pioneer when it comes to rewarding mortgage expenses with any lender. But it’s not the first card to reward cardholders for housing payments. The Bilt Mastercard earns 1X points on rent without the transaction fee (up to 100,000 points in a calendar year). However, in June 2024, the Wall Street Journal reported that Wells Fargo, which issues the card, is losing money on it. It appeared that fewer cardholders than expected carried a balance on their Bilt card month over month, resulting in lower profits from interest payments for the bank. So it’s good for people, but not so great for the bank that issues and services the card.

Moreover, Bilt is planning to offer points on mortgage payments as well, with the first phase of these plans set to be announced in 2025, according to the company’s letter to members.

Where does that leave the Mesa card? Bilt has Wells Fargo behind it, one of the largest commercial banks in the U.S., according to the Federal Reserve. The Mesa card is issued by Celtic Bank, a medium-sized bank specializing in SBA Loans and commercial financing. If the Bilt card struggles to turn a profit, the same issues might plague the Mesa card‚ which doesn’t have such a big bank to lean on.

On the other hand, it appears Mesa isn’t counting on cardholders to carry credit card debt from mortgage payments. That leaves the company with interest revenue from other purchases, affiliate revenue and interchange fees to rely on.

It remains to be seen whether the Mesa card will keep up the momentum sailing the uncharted waters of card rewards in the mortgage space — especially once the Bilt card joins as a competitor.

The bottom line

The Mesa credit card might become an exciting addition to the credit card market. That said, the details about the card are too scarce to draw any definite conclusions. And with how young the company is, only time will tell whether the card will hold. If you do decide to join the waitlist, make sure to learn as much as you can about the terms and conditions when you’re invited to apply.