As the economies of two great Midwestern cities cratered, Dan Gilbert emerged not just unscathed, but stronger, richer, more powerful. At the center of the billionaire’s empire, of course, is Quicken Loans, the company he founded that has risen from the ashes of the 2007 housing market collapse.

The tentacles of Gilbert’s riches reach out across the Rust Belt in veins that touch just about every sector of the economy, as you’re well aware. In Cleveland, he has the Cavs, newly anointed the next champions of the NBA after Gilbert’s wooing of LeBron back to the shores of Lake Erie. And the Horseshoe Casino, and Bizdom U, and a 300-person-plus downtown office of Quicken Loans, headquartered in Detroit.

Back in Michigan, where the 52-year-old makes his home in the Oakland County village of Franklin, his influence is far greater. Gilbert has ushered in a remarkable turnaround for Detroit’s quiet downtown, buying some 60 buildings bustling with some 12,000 employees, more than 2,500 of whom are residents of Detroit proper, feeding much needed income tax into the coffers of the bankrupt city of 680,000. The Detroit metro area is also home to dozens of other companies Gilbert has a stake in, including Bedrock Real Estate Services, Fathead and the Greektown Casino.

The national spotlight has shone warmly on Gilbert’s investments, especially in Detroit where sentiments root for a municipal nightmare of an underdog to undergo the sort of turnaround of which everyone dreams. Politics, for example, have appeared to make that an easy call: Thanks to Michigan’s Democratic then-governor Jennifer Granholm, the state and city agreed to cough up to $200 million in tax incentives over two decades to woo Gilbert’s enterprise. Though many forget, Gilbert dangled the prospect of moving Quicken HQ to Cleveland, before conceding to the Plain Dealer that it’s “awfully hard to move 3,500 people.”

Yet rarely do we see a glimpse of skepticism, of worry that Gilbert is less savior than rat real estate king, of concern whether what’s good for Gilbert is really good for Cleveland or Detroit.

Questioning Gilbert’s good intentions was a point writer Mark Binelli raised in the New York Times back in February 2013, before Michigan appointed an emergency manager in Detroit and officials buckled and filed for municipal bankruptcy.

“Detroiters who are worried about ceding local power to Michigan’s Republican governor shouldn’t forget the ways in which power has already been ceded to an unelected oligarchy, whose members might, no matter how ostensibly well intentioned, possess questionable ideas about urban renewal,” Binelli wrote.

There’s no question Gilbert’s profile has risen due to his successful efforts in bringing businesses into downtown. But it also has been aided and abetted by an adoring public, one who wants to see Detroit thrive like it did when the auto industry still reigned, seemingly by any means necessary, and one in Cleveland who shouts rah-rahs from every street corner at any semblance of downtown development, even if it is a casino.

With such a widespread presence, it becomes easier to see why some have wondered aloud if local media outlets themselves can maintain a healthy level of skepticism of Gilbert’s efforts. Writing for the Columbia Journalism Review, Anna Clark noted that “local coverage [in Detroit] of Gilbert reveals some solidly informative reporting, some glaring gaps, and the occasional cringe-worthy moment.”

One of those glaring gaps, for instance, is what connection Quicken had with the housing crisis of 2007. When questions have been raised, the company has vehemently downplayed any role, bristling at any slight possibility that Quicken’s well-respected name could take a hit.

Gilbert pushes back against any allegation by painting Quicken as one of the good guys of the industry, a lender that didn’t dabble in the type of risky loans and bad practices that eventually generated economic catastrophe, especially in Cleveland and Detroit. Ohio in total had some 100,000 vacant properties in 2013, with 26,000 in Cuyahoga County and 16,000 in Cleveland. The 2013 rate of 9.5 percent of Northeast Ohioans 90 days delinquent or in foreclosure was among the highest in the country.

In the wake of the industry’s implosion, Quicken emerged unscarred. Since the mortgage crisis dissipated, Gilbert has amassed an even larger fortune and the biggest stake — and subsequently, clout — in the direction of how Detroit and Cleveland seek to rebuild.

While doing so, the notion that Quicken escaped the foreclosure crisis without any stains on the company’s record has been virtually accepted by the public.

Reports and profiles of Gilbert attribute Quicken’s escape from the economic collapse to business: that it was a lender who only commingled with safe practices and products.

But lawsuits, federal settlements and records, and interviews with experts suggest a conflicting perspective: It’s not that Quicken wasn’t hurt by the foreclosure crisis because it avoided risky loans; it wasn’t hurt because it passed the risk off to others as soon as the loans were made.

The Gilbert Reaction

First, a note on how Dan Gilbert reacts to media criticism:

Back in early September, Plain Dealer sports columnist Bill Livingston was a guest on Tony Kornheiser’s radio show in Washington D.C. on ESPN 980. In the midst of a wide-ranging conversation on Cleveland sports — Johnny Manziel! LeBron’s coming back! — the topic of Dan Gilbert came up and Livingston didn’t hold back his feelings while touching on Gilbert’s infamous letter and more.

“I could understand playing to his base,” Livingston said. “But this is not the first time that he had released statements like this that weren’t pretty… They were sent out late at night, and draw some connotations from that if you will.”

He continued, leaving the vagaries behind.

“He can have a bit of a hair trigger,” he said. “He can become influenced by all the things that a late night would engender. I think probably alcohol probably played a part of it, just to come out with it. It’s just suppositional on my part, but he’s sent out messages like this before, to Plain Dealer people on the casino issue, that were over the top.”

Livingston was speaking the truth, as three media sources have told Scene over the years, describing similar interactions with Gilbert and worse. The billionaire can unleash torrents of spite when reporters question his decisions, and this time he went straight to Livingston’s bosses at the Plain Dealer with his complaints. They, in turn, would tell Livingston to write a letter of apology to Gilbert, a sanctioned snipping of one of the few who dare call Gilbert to the carpet.

Touchy on the Cavs, and as Livingston said, touchy on the casino.

Back in 2009, Gilbert scammed Ohioans into voting for one of the most lopsided casino deals in the country. A central tenant of Gilbert’s proposal was a $600 million casino overlooking the Cuyahoga River. Once the keys that unlocked the gate to the glorious forest of never-ending money trees were handed over, Gilbert announced the Horseshoe Casino in Cleveland would be housed in the old Higbee Building, with phase 2, the one promised to voters, coming later down the line.

Five years later, phase 2 is exactly where it was then.

The Northeast Ohio Media Group’s Brent Larkin penned a September 2014 column calling out Gilbert’s failure to complete phase 2 yet again, and the numbers were startling and Larkin’s sword sharp. The voter push promised 34,000 jobs. The reality: 10,600 temporary jobs and 4,844 full time.

“Just days before hoodwinking voters in 2009,” Larkin wrote, “Gilbert sent vile emails to top Plain Dealer executives after the newspaper ran a legitimate story reporting Gilbert had been arrested on gambling charges while a student at Michigan State University.

“In May 2013, [Gilbert] tweeted that I was a yellow journalist for having the audacity to suggest he hadn’t kept his word to voters, adding ‘more to be revealed in the months ahead’ about the new casino.

“Seventeen of those months later, we’re still waiting.

“Instead of details about that new casino, we’ve gotten a proposed park with a cheesy sculpture on a postage-stamp-sized parcel of land near Gilbert’s downtown casino.”

That is a side of Daniel Gilbert, founder of online lending giant Quicken Loans, the public doesn’t hear about too often.

The full-throttled response from Dan Gilbert isn’t a surprise, however, to one employee of Quicken Loans. As he put it, it’s clear Quicken employs a clipping service to keep tabs on media reports about the company. And there have been concerns about employees speaking with media outlets.

After a colleague appeared in a report on the Albert — a Detroit-area redevelopment of luxury lofts that resulted in the displacement of a number of low-income residents — “with a fair and, admittedly, dissenting opinion,” a company meeting was called to discuss media relations, the employee told Scene.

In essence, the employee says, the thrust of the meeting was that “when speaking to media … try to not necessarily shed a poor light on the progress that’s being made.”

“It certainly was interesting that a week after the piece was published that all of the sudden we’re all being just reminded about appropriate action when speaking with the media,” the employee says.

Employees “more or less” were encouraged to direct questions to Quicken’s public relations department.

“It certainly was not a gag order,” he says, “but it was a friendly reminder.”

Another current employee who declined to be named says that Quicken as a whole is very touchy about news coverage and actively seeks out the identities of those who speak to the media anonymously — characterizing the process as a “very diligent” hunt to out those who talk.

That concern runs up the chain. When Scene made exploratory phone calls to employees on a Quicken story unrelated to the housing crisis, it received an unprompted email from Tad Carper, VP of communications for the Cleveland Cavaliers, asking what the Quicken story was all about.

That sensitivity has deep roots: In 2008, Crain’s delivered an expose on a convoluted lawsuit involving Quicken-financed mortgages. The company contended a borrower had conspired to fraudulently purchase 16 homes through transactions with Quicken. However, Clark wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review, “Crain’s saw the lender as part of a culture of ‘easy money, rushed deals.'”

At the time, Gilbert was incredulous.

“Crain’s came to these intellectually impotent conclusions over 16 loans where we are the plaintiff suing for fraud,” Gilbert wrote in a response letter to Crain’s. “The other approximately 400,000 loans we closed in all 50 states over the past eight years avoiding fraud, subprime and other short-sighted mortgage fads of the last decade somehow went unaccounted for in the articles.”

Three years later, real estate reporter Michael Hudson of the Center for Public Integrity (CPI) took a deep dive into Quicken’s record. To some, Hudson found, Quicken had in fact hopped the bandwagon on some of those mortgage fads. Between lawsuits from employees who painted a work culture unlike the one Gilbert portrays to the public, and cases involving borrowers who contended they were given a raw deal from Quicken, Hudson wrote those “claims are at odds with [Quicken’s] squeaky clean image.”

No local media followed Hudson’s lead. When a reporter from CBS News asked Quicken for comment on the story, the company jumped to extremes. A spokesperson immediately sought to discredit Hudson, who has covered the finance industry for over two decades, and his outlet as a “not very credible source.”

Nearly four years after the report was published, Gilbert contends that the Center for Public Integrity is “biased against us.” During an interview, he provides a nine-page, daunting point-by-point rebuttal that was seemingly shared with local media outlets at the time Hudson’s report was published.

Clearly the years-old perceived offense is still on his mind.

A tour of the (mostly) familiar

Quicken has some notable marks on its lending record: There’s a $6.5 million settlement the company reached in 2009 with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. over loans it sold to the now-defunct IndyBank that turned sour. Quicken assumed no liability or wrongdoing.

There also remain a number of active lawsuits, which accuse the company of lessening its underwriting standards for loans when times were good. In particular, one case shows, at the very least, one homeowner in Detroit foreclosed on his home after receiving a loan from Quicken in 2006. It was a particular product that has earned the ire of consumer advocates and lawmakers in light of the housing industry’s implosion.

What’s interesting about the allegations, now seven years removed from the height of the crash, is Gilbert’s insistence that Quicken exclusively slung quality product.

In a recent interview with Forbes (where he mused that “debt is what’s going to kill you”), Gilbert said that Quicken avoided risky loan products and subprime borrowers.

To the casual observer, it would appear that those aforementioned circumstances conflict with the presentation of the company Gilbert has portrayed to the public. It seemed prudent to reach out to Quicken to ask for some face-to-face time with Gilbert on the company’s relationship with the lending industry during the boom years — especially considering the impact it had on the nation.

‘We just did not do them’

Dan Gilbert’s 10th floor office in the Compuware building is within earshot of other employees, which you might not expect. Inside, there’s a cut-out of his face leaning on one wall.

Opening conversation hinges on the friendly topics of favorite beer, Gilbert’s idol, and his time, very early in his life, as a TV reporter.

He laughs. “You really did your research,” then adds that he can’t recall a reporter ever asking him about that time in his life. Gilbert had a sports show on a cable station at Michigan State University, where he graduated with a degree in telecommunications.

Eventually, he spent four months working for WKZO-TV in Kalamazoo, covering day-to-day news. He shared camera duties with a partner who would also read the news. He soon realized he didn’t have the interest in pursuing a career as a reporter

“I just realized, I don’t know, it just probably wasn’t my thing,” he says.

He reflects on the answer, and adds that he hasn’t seen any footage in about five years. “I have to figure out where it is,” he says, with a light laugh.

There’s a mantra Gilbert reiterates when asked about what the company is doing in Detroit: “Do well by doing good.” What’s that about?’

“I think there’s a belief, and maybe rightfully so, about how certain companies and corporations have behaved over the years,” he says.

He uses that phrase to explain that, in fact, some companies are not merely “profit based.” There are some that are also “mission based.”

“We also don’t believe there’s conflict in that,” he says. “There are a lot of people who believe there’s a conflict in that — if you make profit it has to be bad.”

That’s not the case with Quicken, he says. Since the company moved to Detroit, it boosts morale and makes employees feel like they’re not solely coming to work for a profit-making business. There’s more at stake here.

“So that’s the general way we look at it,” he says. “You can do both … in our case, we obviously picked up a lot of property that was very low priced and I’m sure we wouldn’t plan on selling it for years, not decades, if ever.”

He continues: “And I’m sure there’s a built-in gain there, but … for us, it was, let’s get in, let’s help these buildings and let’s make it happen. And we just believe — one of our ‘isms,’ as hokey as it is, is ‘money follows’ — there’s not necessarily a conflict in that.”

Gilbert occasionally hits the table to emphasize points. At 5-foot-6, he carries a commanding presence into the room, answering questions with ease. He’s wearing a brown-ish fleece and his hair is slicked back, like it looks in every photo of Gilbert.

“Isms,” for the uninitiated, are Gilbert’s 19 corporate mantras that are defined in a thick book given to every employee and seen throughout the workspaces of every company in the Quicken family. Examples: “There is no they.” (Everyone is in this together.) “We eat our own dog food.” (Employees should be the biggest fan of Quicken.)

Back to his point, Gilbert says, “There’s clearly a conflict in people who do things they shouldn’t be doing.”

Which brings us to the central question: Why does he maintain Quicken never slung rotten loans? The company avoided it, he maintains.

Quicken could have sold those loans, Gilbert says, “But that doesn’t matter. We’re [still] collectible. We have reps and warranties on all these loans. They can come back to us. So we didn’t do them. We just did not do them.”

The issue at hand with the $6.5 million FDIC settlement relates to the so-called representations and warranties Gilbert alludes to. That refers to reference language included in any sale of loans that allows the purchaser to find loans that don’t meet standards, and then require the originator to buy them back. The FDIC declined to comment about the settlement, citing agency policy.

But while Quicken may have been liable, the buy-back period was limited to a finite time span, typically up to one year, says Steve Dibert, founder of mortgage fraud investigation company MFI-Miami. After that, the repercussions of potentially shoddy loans were left to the purchaser. And if an auditor ever reviewed the package of loans, they reviewed a fraction of a percent, Dibert says.

Back inside Gilbert’s office: Even so, he says, the buy-back of loans due to breached representations and warranties is common in the lending industry He takes pains to stress that this is unrelated to problems that led to the mortgage industry’s implosion of 2007. It is common.

When Quicken sells a loan into the secondary market, Gilbert says there’s two instances where the company must represent and offer warranties on what it has sold. First, he says, there’s borrower fraud.

That is, “the borrower commits fraud on that loan and we just didn’t catch it for fraud, and then we sell that loan, and then later on it defaults and [the purchaser catches] fraud in the loan … they can push that loan back to us,” he says. “Some borrowers are pretty damn good at fraud.”

Then, there’s internal fraud, “which was almost never the case,” says Gilbert. “There may have been a handful of loans.

“This is something that has gone on for 25 or 30 years,” he says of repurchasing mortgages. “[T]here’s X amount of loans … [and] a small percentage goes bad, which, when you’re doing a large volume, can be a lot of loans, the first thing [the purchaser wants] to do is ask, ‘Can we push the loan back?'”

What generally happens then, Gilbert says, is a negotiation.

“These settlements happen all the time,” he says, adding, “This [was] just a routine settlement. We probably settled more than $6.5 million in loans this month with investors.”

There are those who say Quicken escaped any liability because they immediately sold the rights to nearly 90 percent of the loans the company originated during the housing boom years, 2005 to 2007.

The lending model that became the name of the game was this: Quantity over quality. At the turn of the century, it became more typical for loans to be bundled into a pool, sold to another lender, and then eventually sold again into a mortgage-backed security on Wall Street.

But Gilbert bristles, saying it’s commonplace for loans to be sold into the secondary market.

“Except for a handful of banks that just keep a handful of their loans in portfolio, on their balance sheet, every other loan that’s originated in the United States — whether from a bank, mortgage company, mortgage broker — is sold into the secondary market,” he says. “That was true then, [and it’s] true now.”

Subprime confusion

On the surface, saying Quicken never messed with subprime lending is, at the very least, a confusing brand of definitive statement to make: A review of published reports during the height of the housing boom show a narrative that bounces back-and-forth from reiterating Gilbert’s line that Quicken didn’t dabble in subprime or risky loans to a completely contradictory picture.

In March 2007, for instance, Quicken CEO Bill Emerson spoke on CNN about the subprime mortgage industry and said 2 percent of the company’s total lending business was in subprime loans.

Later that year, the Detroit News reported that, in 2006, Quicken sold the third-highest amount of subprime loans in Metro Detroit; however, that only accounted for just over 20 percent of its business that year.

In June 2008, News’ financial columnist Brian O’Connor wrote that a pool of loans at the center of a legal dispute between Quicken and Wells Fargo included “subprime adjustable-rate mortgages to home equity lines of credit, [which] were sliced and diced so many ways, and passed around to so many buyers, that everyone claimed risk had been diversified right out of the system.”

As Gilbert puts it, though, subprime lending comes down to a matter of how the word is defined. What it was in 2006 and what it is today is entirely different. To him, “subprime” means a borrower with a low credit score and a high loan-to-value ratio, which is a comparison between the amount of the loan to the value of a home.

He stresses this point. It’s the one thing that “drives him crazy” — reports that question whether or not Quicken sold subprime.

“There’s no set definition of what is subprime,” Gilbert says. “The only thing that really is defined is conforming, Fannie, Freddie, FHA loans,” he says, adding, “Everything else … nonconforming, subprime, alternative lending, jumbo [loans] …. nobody’s got a real definition.”

Gilbert says that judging a loan applicant can be broken down into four categories: credit score, the home’s appraised value, employment history and assets.

“That’s it,” he says, “The first two is what drives it. And if you got loans that are high LTV and bad credit, you’re going to have problems.

“That to me is subprime.”

Gilbert also highlights the company’s ranking by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) as having the third lowest delinquency rating among lenders. Called the “compare ratio,” it compares the number of delinquencies to the FHA’s national average, meaning Quicken’s FHA default rate is half the national average.

And on the subject of overtime lawsuits against Quicken (and, really, on most lawsuits the company considers meritless), Gilbert says, “When companies settle, they become co-conspirators, because they just feed the monster. We’re not going to do that … For us, I couldn’t look at our people everyday and say we paid this.”

After a fast-paced 75 minutes, Gilbert departs and directs any specific questions about lending claims to the remaining group of vice presidents on the rest of the day’s schedule.

In a follow-up email, citing CEO Aaron Emerson’s 2007 remarks on CNN, Scene asks if the company ever sold subprime loans, and how much of it constituted the company’s total lending.

Emerson responded that the vast majority of the company’s business over the years has been and is “straight vanilla, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and FHA home loans.

“[I]f you are using the word ‘subprime’ as is most commonly used in today’s world, which refers to toxic loans with 12 percent, 13 percent, 14 percent or even higher interest rates that was responsible for the collapse of the U.S. mortgage market and even the U.S. economy: NO, QUICKEN LOANS NEVER PARTICIPATED NOR ORIGINATED THESE TYPES OF LOANS,” he wrote.

He adds: “As far as the specific stories you cite … the paragraphs above should give you full and satisfactory explanation, and if not then the reports were flat-out wrong.”

Got that? This, in response to a question as to why the company’s CEO himself told a national news outlet that a fraction of his company’s business in the mid-2000s was in subprime loans.

What about this?

Okay, so maybe they skirted selling an abundant amount of subprime loans. But then why is a bank currently suing Quicken-originated loans it says the company misrepresented, omitted, or even committed “fraud in the loan origination process”?

“The reviews revealed that many of the mortgage loans did not possess the represented characteristics and safeguards at the time of the securitization,” the complaint filed by Deutsche Bank National Trust Co. says. Essentially, securitization is the process of combining a pool of contractual debt, such as residential mortgages, and selling that pool to investors with mortgage payments as security.

“Instead, therefore, of receiving a pool of loans having the characteristics and quality represented by Quicken, the trust received a far riskier and less stable loan pool,” the complaint continues.

Deutsche cites an instance where borrowers misrepresented their income to Quicken, whom the complaint says “failed to test the reasonableness of such income.”

According to the complaint, one borrower stated he was a restaurant manager, with a monthly income of $10,000 on his application for a loan. As it turns out, the borrower’s income tax statements showed he earned only $4,621 per month.

Records show the $171,000 loan in question was a 5-year, hybrid adjustable-rate mortgage (ARM) rider, which initially allowed the borrower to make payments that didn’t even cover the monthly 6.875 percent interest costs. It bears mentioning that, at any given time, the borrower was afforded the ability to pay a larger amount to pare down the principal.

Interestingly, after five years, the interest rate could begin to change, records show, with a cap at 11.875 percent. At that point, the borrower could have begun to make interest-only payments.

But the borrower never reached that point. The Detroit home in question was eventually lost to foreclosure in 2010, records show. Attempts to reach the homeowner were unsuccessful.

It has also been established that Quicken sold so-called “stated-income loans,” which eventually earned the pejorative title of “liar loans,” as a borrower would only be required to state how much they earned without any supporting documentation.

Asked about whether Quicken ever sold “stated-income” products, Mike Lyons, vice president for operations at Quicken, spoke generally on the company’s past practices: The company had a number of backstops in place to verify a potential applicants’ employment and income, he says.

For example, if an applicant stated they made a certain amount, a loan officer would have tested the “reasonableness” of that figure by comparing it to an independent salary tool, like Salary.com. Bob Walters, the company’s chief economist, says it’s no secret these products were widespread during the boom years, and adds that, during an application process a company employee would then verbally verify with the applicant’s employer to confirm employment status.

Today, Quicken doesn’t offer stated-income products. However, Walters says it offered many homeowners who earned part-time income from various jobs, or those who were self-employed, an opportunity to achieve the American Dream: their own home.

“There was a lot of people that were able to buy homes — immigrants, people who have multiple families under one roof, quite frankly, a lot of people working under the table … [who were] not always getting these nice W-2s that you and I may get,” Walters says. “Maybe they’re self-employed.”

He adds: “Income is one of the biggest reasons people have a challenging time qualifying. Not because they don’t have enough: It’s because they can’t easily document it.”

This group of top Quicken reps never gets around to discussing specifics on certain lawsuits mentioned in initial inquiries to the company, because it becomes evident early on that everyone in the room could speak only in generalities.

So in the same follow-up email to Emerson, Scene asks directly about the specific loan for the Detroit homeowner referenced in the Deutsche lawsuit. Emerson tells Scene to “keep in mind” that the company has sold more than two million loans, and for years has had stringent underwriting controls in place.

“However, when a national home lender closes more 2.1 million mortgages, one would always be able to find a handful of loans and situations — even with the most stringent controls in place ­— where something potentially went wrong,” he writes.

And, he continues: “Clearly, it would be an unfair characterization that anything in our underwriting or loan processing systems is defective using a handful of loans (or even hundreds of loans or more) as evidence of such.”

Would Emerson’s response have been the same if we included the fact that the same lawsuit from Deutsche mentions a loan for a home in Washtenaw County, Mich., where the borrower allegedly represented he earned $13,500 per month? As it turns out, the borrower’s bankruptcy documents filed after he received the loan show he only earned roughly $8,837 per month.

Or, perhaps Emerson’s response would change if we had mentioned the lawsuit filed by a Romulus, Mich., woman who claimed her Quicken loan officer, one day before closing, increased her closing costs by roughly double — and then gave her an interest rate nearly 2 percentage points higher. The net effect? The homeowner’s monthly cost shot up $850 dollars, or 73 percent, to $2,036 per month, court documents show. Still, the homeowner signed anyway, which is partly why her case was dismissed by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Or perhaps his response would have changed if we had mentioned the 79-year-old retired woman on a fixed income we recently met who, seven years ago, was sold a 30-year mortgage from Quicken for a home that was already paid off. It required her to pay interest only, for the first decade.

She will be 102 when her mortgage is fully amortized.

Vince Grzegorek has been with Scene since 2007 and editor-in-chief since 2012. He previously worked at Discount Drug Mart and Texas Roadhouse.

27 replies on “What Kind of Track Records Do Dan Gilbert and Quicken Loans Really Have? And Does Anyone Really Care?”

  1. It is sad to see this article making comments as the defender of truth when the motive to discredit Gilbert in my opinion is based on the close association between Scene and owners of Hard Rock Rocksino. Just seems to be in my option a transparent cheap shot perhaps indirectly from a business competitor in local VLT gaming. People in glass houses throwing stones is my option. Can’t say enough about the best owner in pro sports today that gives half his wealth to charity but writing that wouldn’t be possible huh?

  2. As life long Clevelander really appreciate what Dan Gilbert has brought to town and some start up news source writes such an untrue characterization of a reputable company in Quicken Loans and goes after him for what?

  3. Team Dan…I didn’t see any other private business leaders looking to lead the urban renewal charge in Cleveland other than dead beats looking for a hand out. Go Cavs and Go Dan!

  4. A lot of fluff and stuff presented in a scary campfire story manner, but not actually being scary. Maybe there’s a more fleshed out comedic name for that out in the world. Maybe a couple actual interesting insights in this whole piece that will hopefully be fleshed out over the coming years, but right now don’t actually change how I feel about the subjects, because I didn’t have them on a pedestal to begin with, but nor did I view them as a masked evil.

    Anyway, at the end there because it’s fresh in my mind; are the elderly not deserving of exploiting the equity in their homes however they should choose? You know we have this whole system of estate planning and probate courts to handle these things. Just a truly bizarre way to end an article whose intent is to cast shade upon Gilbert/Quicken Loans. Like I said, unscary campfire story.

  5. 99.9% of this story is aggregated from previously written material at other publications. There’s no new ground being broken here. I don’t quite understand what Scene Editor Vince Grzegorek is going for here. He might as well work at Northeast Ohio Media Group. I am growing very concerned that the new owners of Scene are driving it right into the ground. Where are the high standards? And I’d also like to see an explanation why Scene relocated its offices to Bolivar Ave.? The office space sure ain’t any cheaper. I’m very close to declaring this Alt-mag dead.

  6. Oye, I just read a huge “Boogeyman” narrative with no concrete example of wrongdoing:

    His company doesn’t want middle management or lower level employees talking to the press….every company I have ever worked for has done that.
    His company “may have according to some definitions” originated a small number of subprime mortgages and sold them on the secondary market….every bank did that and by all accounts presented in this article, Quicken Loans was one of the most prudent.
    He gets touchy when the media makes flimsy, generally unsubstantiated accusations of widespread wrongdoing….please show me a business owner who would embrace that.

    What is even being alleged here? From my experience in the industry, Quicken Loans was not a bad actor. I guess if you don’t have any real examples of wrongdoing, you can always play the “well, he might have” card. I love you Scene but this seems a bit desperate.

    All of that said, (RIP Columbia Building) 🙁

  7. Scene was near Bankruptcy when current owners bought it cheap and the positive contributions that Dan Gilbert has made will remain after this mag is out of business. Or I could tell u about the 79 year old woman whose grandson had cancer that Dans donations assisted.

  8. As a former employee who left willingly on my own I can attest to the many shading dealings inside of Quicken Loans. The culture is one of sex, harrassment, drugs, and greed. The company promises so much to new fresh faced bankers who have little financial experience and fails miserably while trying to squeeze money from the friends and families of these new employees.

    When you are hired and placed into a training class you are asked to create a contact list of all of your friends and family called a “Sphere/Circle of Influence”. You are expected to call everyone you’ve listed in an effort to sell them a mortgage. Very few people feel comfortable selling something as expensive and personal as a mortgage to their friends and families. However, if you do not have enough contacts or sales you will be reprimanded.

    Once you are on the sales floor you will be paired up with another banker to learn how they perform their jobs. I witnessed customers being told lies and half truths as they were not explained the $300 to $500 good faith estimate was non-refundable. I also saw points and other fees being added to unsuspecting and uneducated homeowners and first time buyers who are desperate to save their homes or buy one.

    Bankers are not only encouraged but low-key threatened to work extreme hours at salary pay. There is no regard to family or one’s desire to lead a balanced life. For many, 60 hours a week is the norm with some working all day Saturday and Sunday. The all around atmosphere brings shades of “The Boiler Room” to mind.

    There is a parking lot attached to the Quicken Loans building where many of the bankers park. Sometimes you won’t be able to find particular bankers and it soon became common knowledge that a few of them were in their vehicles doing drugs such as pills and coke. The team leaders encourage high energy selling and some bankers felt they needed these drugs to perform at a top level.

    I have so many stories I could share, but I have tried to forget what was easily the worst job I’ve ever had. I met some good people there that I’ve kept in touch with and I am amazed a few have been able to stay within such a soul-sucking environment. This is especially true for the ones who have gone several months without hitting their #s and not receiving a commission. The misery seems to run rampant, however, there is extreme nepotism and those bankers are protected.

    While I cannot say for certain that Dan Gilbert knows exactly what goes on within his company on an employee level, I can’t imagine him being completely in the dark. Also, it is true that Gilbert ran an illegal gambling outfit out of his parents house. It’s well documented! One thing about Gilbert is that he is a shrewd businessman. He balances winning public favor with lining his pockets.

    Unlike the past few Cavs seasons all I can say is “Game well played!”

  9. You one of the losers that couldn’t make it and was fired because of your incompetence/laziness? Funny how trolls like you find the courage to spew unsubstantiated garbage when you hide behind an anynomous message board. Yeah, I am sure Quicken is a boiler room where employees need to do coke in the parking lot just to compete. Do you have any clue of how much of an imbecile you sound like writing something as asinine as that? Is this how the company ranks high on the list of Best Places To Work in the country every year? Is this how the company gets awarded best place to get a mortgage in the country every year by JP Power? Nothing attracts the parasites of the world stronger than a message board. As for the article: Has there ever been a more cliche-like “look at me, aren’t I a cool anti-establishment dude who so badly wants attention, please look at me, please” article ever written? I don’t know Vince or Ryan but you have to believe these boys got the crap knocked out of them after consistently being picked last growing up. When that happens repeatedly I suppose that turns a half-man a bit vengeful, no? One more thing: How laughable is it that the people most sensitive to criticism are the very writers whose job in life it is to embellish, tell half-truths and fabricate lies for a living? Sounds like someone in Gilbert’s shop made that over the hill, bitter rose-skinned, hack Bill Liivingston apologize for calling Gilbert a “drunk” on national radio. My my, my that was low of this man. How dare he (or someone in his shop) demand that the slanderer Livingston apologize for slandering Dan on national radio?! Can you imagine how bad it must be to be these writers who attempt to gain some thread of self-esteem back from all of the playground abuse they obviously took in their youths by conjuring up some empty twisted bunch of words attacking highly successful and honest individuals other than to slander them in some online rag? Any reader with half a brain can sniff out what these writers are all about within the first three paragraphs. Pathetic. Embarrassing. Not surprising though.

  10. to exposing Vince: Back in 2007 during a Quicken incentive trip to Puerto Rico, a high level manager got some uncut cocaine and brought back to the resort where they were staying. One Quicken employee overdosed and was hospitalized for days before returning to Cleveland. Cocaine is part of the culture at Quicken in order to work the 60 plus hours required. Dan Gilbert was given a sweetheart deal with the casino and is failing to build the new casino he promised and Brent Larkin was totally right in his article.

  11. The dude is shady, to not see that is blind idiocy. There is a reason he focuses his business efforts only in struggling cities, and it’s not due to his high morals. These cities like Detroit and Cleveland have struggled for so long, they will embrace anyone willing to throw some money in, even if that means giving away the store with tax breaks & incentives.
    Cleveland got screwed on the Casino deal after providing the main support and platform for Dan to get casinos in all the major cities in Ohio. He’s a slumlord in a facy suit.

  12. Is Gilbert Mother Theresa? Of course not. You don’t get to be a self-made billionaire at his age without coming out as the winner in deals where others come out as losers. Part of the delay in phase II of the casino has to do with competing Forest City Enterprises. They expect Gilbert to pay top dollar for the dollar store-lined Avenue at Tower City Gilbert already bought the Higbee building, the Ritz Carlton, and rents space in the old post office (M.K. Ferguson Plaza). He has every right to expect Forest City to play nice as they sell off their assets in Ohio. The recent announcement that Tower City was being shopped to another purchaser was really an effort to raise the price tag for Gilbert.

  13. The fact that there is a “phase II” should infuriate you if you have any love for the city of Cleveland. Every other city gets a brand new casino, Cleveland gets an old musty department store turned into a money maker for King Dan. He preys on struggling municipalities for his own gain. Think about it, how much better off is Detroit with everything he has done there? Not much, if any at all. Ever been to the area around Detroit Casinos? Not exactly thriving, but the casinos are profitable and that is all he cares about.

  14. When Issue 3 was passed many voted for it as I did. I would not change my vote. Facts are that while some problems logistic and parking etc. the public began asking for a quicker Temporary Casino and hence along came Phase 1. The unexpected issue of much slower gaming market in Ohio than anticipated showed itself and despite that Dan is still committed to a Phase 2 but clearly must in my opinion ride out the market until numbers improve and he could not have foreseen this when Issue 3 was on the table unless he can predict the future. Shots being taken at him are in my opinion being orchestrated by business competition.

  15. Seriously Scene – let me ask you this: Is Scene (and Cleveand) better off with Dan Gilbert in Cleveland, or not? That’s a rhetorical question. Even if every allegation and unfinished lawsuit were true, do you think that the net effect of Quicken, the Cavs and the Casino is NEGATIVE for the ciity?

    I don’t need to rehash any points made in the above comments, but suffice to say, you could dive into any banking/mortgage company (or most corporations) and find these type of shenanigans and worse.
    “Shocked! I am shocked…”

  16. dan was a criminal bookie in college….he learns to get in the game on the legal side and boiler room is exactly what the loan company is….

    he preys on the poor…hence urban casinos

    dirty dan media team can now pound me too

  17. Dan took The Giving Pledge and donates HALF his earnings to charity but Dirty Laundry is what malcontents and weasels look for.

  18. Cleveland has been on a roll since Dan came to town. Popular with fans like no other owner in this town and with good reason. A shame that some magazine with wobbly legs financially tries to discredit him to try to boost circulation but the dye has been cast. Who wants to bet that Dan and his positive Mark on this town will be here long after Scene is long gone?

  19. Quicken Loans was polite and helpful and courteous and would recommend them to anyone interested in getting the most knowledgeable folks in the Biz!

  20. All this article seems to say is Gilbert is making Cleveland and Detroit better places, but he’s sure making a ton of $$ in the process of doing so. People are so desperate for someone to help their cities, that they will aggressively and immediately attack anyone that writes or says anything to the contrary. It’s like the one guy who says how well the Browns are playing, and everyone immediately yells at him or hits him to shut him up before he jinxes everything. Gilbert is a very, very smart businessman, and he’s not giving away his money and getting zero return. You have to spend money to earn money, and he’s making way more money giving away half with his casino and everything else, than he’d be making if he wasn’t viewed as the savior of Cleveland and Detroit. Actually, how he’s viewed keeps people from asking too many questions and worrying that maybe he’s getting a little too much power. At this point though, I’d say we’re already in too deep. Might as well get ready to rename the cities Giltroit and Gilveland.

  21. I love that this article askI have if anyone cares about the track record and goes on about complete nonsense forget LoL Dan Gilbert is a mogul, businessman, investor and a motivator. The claims on this so called ‘article’ are comedy. You specified on specific loans instead of a percentage of these ‘bad’ loans. I mean who cares about that needle, when there’s a haystack of good loans that closed. Dan has a past, guess what, he’s human. His phase II plan took longer than expected. Because all rising empires go exactly according to plan. The two morons who wrote this should probably learn how compose an outline.

  22. I had an extremely bad experience with this company. As I talked to a mortgage guy on the phone, it became increasingly clear that this was a high-pressure sales operation … not a professional mortgage brokerage. They charged me a fee, just to email me a good faith estimate of my loan costs. Then, they turned around said it “wasn’t refundable.” I would like to emphasize that NO one mentioned any fee — refundable or non — before they charged me. They said they needed a credit card number to verify former credit history, then charged me a $380 fee. Luckily, I was able to dispute the charge with the credit card company, and I got my money back.

    I told them I didn’t want to do business with them anymore, and the guy started arguing with me on the phone. He became extremely rude. I said goodbye for good. After that, I started getting multiple phone calls. One guy wouldn’t even let me get in a word … just kept talking over me like he didn’t hear or something. I finally had to hang up on him.

    There is no doubt in my mind that this company was a sleezy, high-pressure operation.

    Now … if any of you paid hacks wants to start criticizing my post, and insulting me for telling the truth … help yourself. It will only show what kind of outfit Quicken really is. And as a matter of fact, it wouldn’t bother me one little bit … I think it’s hillarious to read your insults on this post. When you insult people who have had a bad experience with Quicken, you are only showing everyone on the internet what kind of people you really are, and — more importantly — what kind of business Quicken Loans really is.

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