Mortgage Lender Quicken Loans Files for IPO
By Chava Gourarie July 8, 2020 6:30 pm
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Mortgage company Quicken Loans filed for an initial public offering, one of the few companies to attempt going public after the coronavirus pandemic began.
Rocket Companies, the parent company of Quicken Loans, filed the paperwork Tuesday, after confidentially filing with the Securities Exchange Commission last month, the Financial Times first reported.
Quicken Loans is owned by Detroit businessman Dan Gilbert, who also owns the Cleveland Cavaliers, and an extensive real estate portfolio in Detroit under the name Bedrock Detroit.
Gilbert founded Quicken Loans in 1985 as an alternative lender, and built it into the largest mortgage lender in the United States. It surpassed Wells Fargo in 2018 with more than $80 billion in loans, and then originated $145 billion in loans in 2019, according to FT.
That helped the company’s income grow 46 percent in 2019 to $892 million based on $5.1 billion of revenue, according to the filing. Quicken Loans also recorded $1.8 billion of revenue in the first three quarters of 2020, before the brunt of the pandemic hit, compared with $727 million in the same period last year, a 148 percent increase.
The company plans to use the ticker symbol RKT, and listed the size of the IPO as $100 million as a placeholder number. Rocket also owns Rocket Mortgage, a product used by Quicken Loans to estimate and originate loans online.
A successful IPO would be a win for the economy, as well as for Detroit, the company’s home base. Gilbert moved Quicken Loans to downtown Detroit in 2010 from the city’s suburbs, in an effort to rebuild the decimated city. Gilbert’s Bedrock now owns large swaths of the downtown area, which has seen a resurgence over the past decade.
