Right now is a great time to be in the mortgage business. Since the beginning of 2019, falling interest rates have been spurring gains industry-wide, with the biggest players all announcing positive growth trends. Now, the biggest market player of all has joined them.
This month, Detroit, MI-based Quicken Loans announced that they had finished crunching their second-quarter numbers and that they reflected the best quarter in the company’s history. The 34-year-old lender revealed that they had set new loan origination records in April, May, and June, with each month beating the one before it. Taken together, they added up to $32 billion in loan originations in the quarter.
Inside the Numbers
According to Courtesy Loans, the company didn’t provide a detailed look at the loan origination numbers that made up its record-breaking quarter, they did provide a summary breakdown of the overall activity. It included loan totals of:
- April – Over $10 billion
- May – Over $10 billion
- June – Nearly $11 billion
The totals, while inexact, indicate both the stability that exists in the Quicken Loans operation, as well as the robust nature of the ongoing growth. There’s no sign of any month being an outlier that signals this to be a temporary boost in loan activity, which bodes well for the second half of the year.
Across-The-Board Growth
The record-setting origination numbers weren’t the only positive pieces of news coming from the well-known lender. They also announced that they were in the process of trying to fill 1,300 open positions across their nationwide offices, which reflected the rapid expansion brought on by their second-quarter success.
A look at the underlying data also shows that much of the recent activity represented new home purchases, rather than refinancing of existing loans, which is another good indication that this is more than an interest-rate fueled growth phase.
In May, the company reported that they set a new mark for closed home purchase loan volume, illustrating the point. Included in that figure is the fact that more than two-thirds of the cash loans originated via the company’s flagship Rocket Mortgage online service were for home purchases – and that a full three-quarters of those were for a first home.
Empowering Philanthropy
According to Quicken Loans’ CEO Jay Farner, the most important result of all the good news is that it’s allowing the company to expand its community outreach and service programs. He sums this point up by saying “The ultimate impact of a record-breaking quarter is that we can continue to reinvest our resources into communities like Detroit through our ‘For-More-Than-Profit’ approach.
From education and housing stability initiatives to entrepreneurship programs, our team members are at the forefront of growth – both in the business and the communities in which they live, work, and play.”
That’s good news for Detroit since the company and its corporate siblings have devoted a great deal of time and money to the community in the last decade. All told, the company has invested over $200 million and its employees have logged over 500,000 hours of volunteer time in the past nine years alone, with even more to come.
The company sees all this work as playing a vital role in helping to stabilize and improve the housing market in the greater Detroit area, which is good for all involved.
Welcome Good News
All of the positivity coming from Quicken Loans comes at a difficult time for the company, however. Over the memorial day weekend, company founder Dan Gilbert suffered a stroke, followed by more than three weeks in a hospital. While the prognosis remains unclear, the few public pronouncements have remained positive.
The one thing that is clear, however, is that Gilbert would certainly appreciate both the company’s strong performance and its renewed commitment to community reinvestment, as he’s been a champion of Detroit’s revival for many years now. He was the driving force in the relocation of the Quicken Loans headquarters to downtown Detroit in 2010 and has invested heavily in the city’s central business district in the years since.
At the time of this writing, Quicken Loans and its subsidiaries employ over 17,000 people within Detroit, who no doubt cheered the second-quarter news and anxiously await the recovery of Gilbert.
In the meantime, company vice-chairman Bill Emerson reassured the community that Gilbert’s initiatives would continue, saying “We know what the mission is. We know what to do.” And judging by the company’s recent pronouncements, it appears that they do.
