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Dan Gilbert: "One day at a time." (Photo by Steve Jennings)
Quicken Loans founder Dan Gilbert has gobbled up real estate in downtown Detroit and beyond at a ferocious pace ever since he moved his company to Detroit in 2011.
Gilbert is rightly listed as one of Crain's Detroit Business 2017 Newsmakers of the Year. Kirk Pinho tells why:
To describe Dan Gilbert’s 2017, you almost have to look outside the dictionary.
The billionaire founder and chairman of Quicken Loans Inc. and Rock Ventures LLC started construction in downtown Detroit on the state’s tallest building, helped usher through the state Legislature a sweeping series of tax incentives for large-scale developments (yes, like the ones he is doing), and pushed the region’s political, business, nonprofit and education leaders to work on a best-foot-forward bid to lure Jeff Bezos and Amazon to build a second corporate campus in Detroit and Windsor.
In addition, many of the other redevelopments in his ever-growing pipeline got underway, were revealed publicly for the first time or were completed, ranging from the redevelopment of the Book Tower to an addition to One Campus Martius and news that his team has been in discussions about redeveloping the massive former Uniroyal Tire Co. site on the east Detroit riverfront. . . .
"It’s been crazy," Gilbert said. "You gotta do it one day at a time or you sort of get overwhelmed."
In short: It was a banner year for Detroit’s most influential landlord and developer, who moved Quicken to the city in 2011 and has been on a virtually non-stop acquisition and building spree in and around downtown, renovating and filling up long-vacant buildings and coming out with new construction plans.
