

Gilbert said that his company has been unfairly targeted.

Sitting on the edge of a chair in his office, the Motor City’s skyline a steel gray in the late-afternoon November sun, Mr. Late last year, Quicken Loans won a motion to move the Department of Justice case to a federal courthouse roughly three blocks from its Detroit headquarters. He is working to rectify the city’s downtrodden image with streetcars, upscale cafes and boutiques, and fiber-optic data, making him a hometown hero.
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Gilbert, who founded the company in 1985, sold it to the business software company Intuit in 1999, before buying it back with other investors in 2002. He also owns significant chunks of central Detroit, where Quicken Loans is based. superstar LeBron James for leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers, in which Mr. But it reflects the in-your-face style of Quicken Loans’ founder and chairman, Dan Gilbert, the billionaire who once publicly excoriated the N.B.A. In an aggressive move, the company pre-emptively sued the Department of Justice, demanding a blanket ruling that all of the loans it had originated met requirements and “pose no undue risks to the F.H.A. insurance program’s largest participant.Įxecutives at Quicken Loans deny the charges, maintaining, among other things, that the government “cherry-picked” a small number of examples to build its case. As a result, when those loans soured, the government says that taxpayers - not Quicken loans - suffered millions of dollars in losses. In a federal false-claims lawsuit filed in 2015, the Department of Justice charged that, among other things, the company misrepresented borrowers’ income or credit scores, or inflated appraisals, in order to qualify for Federal Housing Administration insurance. Privately held Quicken, like some of America’s largest banks before it, has also landed in regulators’ cross hairs. Today, it is the second-largest retail mortgage lender, originating $96 billion in mortgages last year - an eightfold increase from 2008. In the years since the crisis, many of the nation’s largest banks pulled back their mortgage-lending activities. But the whimsical, irreverent atmosphere sits atop a fast-growing business in a field - the selling of the American dream - that has changed drastically since an earlier generation of mortgage lenders propelled the economy to near collapse in 2008 by issuing risky and even fraudulent loans. On any given day, a company mascot, Simon, a bespectacled mouse, goes on the hunt for “gouda,” or good ideas, from the work force.Ī visit to the headquarters of Quicken Loans in downtown Detroit may seem like a trip to a place where “Glengarry Glen Ross” meets Seussville. DETROIT - A low buzz fills the air as an army of mortgage bankers, perched below floating canopies in a kaleidoscope of vivid pinks, blues, purples and greens, works the phones, promising borrowers easy financing and low rates for home loans.īy the elevators, nobody blinks when an employee wearing a pink tutu bustles past.
