Five years after introducing the Rocket Mortgage brand for digital lending, Rocket Companies will finally retire the legacy Quicken name on July 31.
“More than 20 years ago, Dan Gilbert, our founder and chairman, had a vision of putting the entire mortgage process online to simplify the lending experience and add more transparency. Since then, we developed proprietary technology to improve every piece of the process but we officially revolutionized the mortgage industry when we launched Rocket Mortgage in 2015,” said Jay Farner, Rocket Mortgage CEO. “Rocket Mortgage has grown to be the industry leader and the measuring stick for all other lenders. With this official name change, we will have a consistent brand that is synonymous with innovation and excellence.”
Rocket Mortgage was founded by Dan Gilbert in 1985 as Rock Financial, a regional mortgage broker shop in Detroit. In 1998, Gilbert began exploring how to put the entire home loan experience online. He launched Rockloans.com in 1999 and then sold the company for $370 million in 1999 to Intuit. He merged the firm with Intuit’s QuickenMortgage which was then named Quicken Loans. He bought it back from Intuit for $23.3 million, and a licensing agreement allowed them to continue using the Quicken brand.
The firm closed its brick-and-mortar operations and became a direct-to-consumer lender. It was the first lender to launch a mobile app in 2011. It became the country’s largest mortgage lender in 2017.
During the Super Bowl of 2016, the company introduced the Rocket Mortgage brand, signaling an eventual end to the Quicken monicker. as “Rocket Mortgage by Quicken Loans.” In the ensuing years, it named its real estate platform Rocket Homes and its auto loan platform Rocket Auto. Last year, shortly after Rocket Companies went public, officials rebranded the third-party origination channel to Rocket Pro TPO.
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