Dan Gilbert appears ‘strong and steady’ in recorded video to Quicken employees

Since having a stroke on May 26 this year, there’s been little news about the health of Dan Gilbert, the Quicken Loans and Rock Ventures founder who’s invested billions of dollars in downtown Detroit real estate.

Quicken Loans CEO Jay Farner released a statement in June saying Gilbert had been discharged from the hospital to an in-patient rehabilitation center to continue his recovery.

But on August 1, Gilbert was seen for the first time beyond a close circle of friends and colleagues, as he addressed Quicken Loan’s 17,000 employees in a recorded video message. The video has not been released to the public, but Detroit News columnist Nolan Finley saw part of it and described the 57-year-old Gilbert this way:

His face shows no signs of a stroke. His speech is clear, and his voice is strong and steady. He looks somewhat thinner than before the stroke, but not weak or wan.

”Whatever you’re doing is great,” Gilbert tells his employees. “It’s going much better since I left a few weeks back, I noticed.”

Charlie Langton, a legal analyst for WJBK Fox 2, posted snippets of the video to Twitter.

No specifics were given in the video about how long he’ll be away from day-to-day operations, though the process of recovering from a stroke can often take months.

Gilbert’s family of companies has continued to progress in his absence. Quicken Loans just reported its strongest quarterly earnings ever, and Bedrock recently purchased the Courtyard by Marriott and got approval from HUD to buy the Brewster-Douglass site for $23 million.