Quicken Loans on track to set new mortgage record this year

One of Detroit’s largest employers is set to do more business than ever this year.

Quicken Loans, the Dan Gilbert–owned mortgage company based in Detroit, is on pace to originate more than $140 billion in mortgages in 2019, the Detroit Free Press reports. Its previous record was $96 billion in 2016.

Detroit has seen a steady increase of mortgages issued every year since 2012. But the majority of Quicken Loans’s business in the last year has come through refinancing loans. The 30-year fixed interest rate is currently at 3.68 percent, the lowest rate since around September 2016.

”I will say that with interest rates falling, refinance has skewed higher than in the past,” Bob Walters, Quicken’s president and chief operating officer, told the Free Press.

Gilbert relocated the company downtown in 2010 and has been investing nearby properties ever since. Quicken Loans says that it employs more than 15,000 in Detroit and has hired 3,500 over the last year to process the increasing demand.

Gilbert’s health is still a major question. He suffered a stroke on May 26 and returned to metro Detroit after spending two months in an out-of-state rehab facility. In October, Gilbert and fellow billionaire Stephen Ross announced they’d be partnering with the University of Michigan to build a $300 million campus at the eastern edge of downtown focusing on high-tech research.