Good afternoon, and welcome to Rocket Company's First Annual Shareholder Meeting. I am Dan Gilbert, the Chairman of the Board of Directors. I want to thank you all for your support since our IPO last August. One of our isms here is called You'll see it when you believe it, and we appreciate your belief in the rocket companies and the mission we are on creating cutting edge tech and empowering great people to make life important and complicated transactions perfectly simple. We are happy to talk with you today about what the rocket companies has accomplished over the past ten months.
To officially kick off this meeting, I wanna introduce someone who joined our company twenty five years ago and has been a driving force moving our business forward ever since. Please join me in welcoming our CEO and vice chairman, Jay Farner.
Thank you, Dan, and good afternoon, everyone. I'll be acting as the Chair of the meeting. Angela Vitale, our General Counsel and Corporate Secretary, will act as Secretary of the meeting. I'm pleased to introduce the current members of our board who are present virtually today in addition to Dan and myself, Jennifer Gilbert, Jonathan Mariner, Matthew Ryszak, Suzanne Shank, and Nancy Tellem. Also with us today are members of our management team.
In addition to Angela and myself, we've got Bob Walters, our president and chief operating officer, and Julie Booth, our chief financial officer and treasurer. Ronald Genti, a partner of our independent accounting firm Ernst and Young, is also present. We ask that everyone abide by the rules of conduct for the meeting, which are available on the virtual meeting website. The rules of conduct are designed to allow us to conduct an orderly meeting in fairness to all stockholders. Before we proceed further, Angelo will report on the mailing of the notice of meeting and the existence of
a quorum. Angelo? Thank you, Jay. All stockholders of record at the close of business on 03/31/2021 are entitled to vote at this meeting. I have the certified list of stockholders entitled to vote at this meeting and the affidavit of distribution establishing that notice of this meeting was duly given.
A copy of the notice of meeting, proxy card, proxy statement, notice of Internet availability, and affidavit of distribution will be filed in our corporate records with the minutes of this meeting. John Holiwa of American Election Services has been appointed as inspector of election for this meeting. Mister Holiwa has been sworn in, and a copy of his oath will also be filed in our corporate records. Holders of a majority of the voting power of all shares of common stock outstanding on the record date and entitled to vote are present by remote communication or represented by proxy at this meeting. Therefore, a quorum is present, and this meeting is duly and lawfully convened.
We may proceed with the business of the meeting.
Jay? Thank you, Angelo. Voting for all proposals is now open. If you have already sent your proxy card or voting instruction card or voted by Internet or telephone, your shares will be voted accordingly. You do not need to vote today unless you're voting for the first time or you wanna change your previous vote.
Any stockholder who is logged in using your 16 digit control number and wants to vote during this meeting or wants to change his or her prior vote may do so now by using the voting buttons on the virtual meeting website. The polls will close after the presentation of the last proposal. Please submit any questions about the proposals set forth in the agenda in the field provided in the virtual meeting website. We will answer proxy related questions if they are received before the voting is closed. After the polls close, we will announce the preliminary results of today's meeting.
Following the conclusion of the formal business, I will give a business update, and we will respond to appropriate questions relevant to the company from stockholders, excluding matters relating to the proposals for the meeting. Please submit any general questions in the field provided in the virtual meeting website at any time during the meeting. We have four matters to be acted upon today at this meeting. You will be asked to elect three class one directors to our board for three year terms, ratify the appointment of Ernst and Young as our independent registered public accounting firm for 2021, approve the compensation of our named executive officers, and approve whether an advisory vote on the compensation of our named executive officers should occur occur every one, two, or three years. The first proposal is the election of the three class one directors to serve for a three year term and until a successor has been duly elected and qualified or until such director's earlier resignation, retirement, or other termination of service.
The board has nominated Jennifer Gilbert, Jonathan Mariner, and myself. Since no stockholder has provided notice of director nominations for this meeting in accordance with our bylaws, the nominations are closed. You can read a short, biography of each nominee in the company's proxy statement. In renominating these three individuals, the board and the nominating and corporate governance committee chose directors that the board believes have an appropriate balance of knowledge, experience, attributes, skills, and expertise individually and together with the continuing directors on the board to ensure that the board appropriately fulfills its oversight responsibilities and acts in the best interest of stockholders and the company. The board recommends that you vote for each nominee for director.
The second item of business is the ratification of Ernst and Young to serve as our independent registered public accounting firm for the year ending 12/31/2021. The board recommends you vote for this proposal. Ronald Genti of Ernst and Young is present at this meeting and available to respond to appropriate questions of stockholders. The third item of business is the advisory vote on our named executive officers' compensation by vote on the following resolution. Resolved, that the company's stockholders approve on an advisory basis the compensation of the named executive officers as disclosed in the company's proxy statement for the twenty twenty one Annual Meeting of Stockholders pursuant to the compensation disclosure rules of the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the compensation discussion and analysis, the summary compensation table for 2020 and 2019 and the other related tables and disclosure.
This item has been covered in-depth in the proxy statement. The board recommends you vote for this proposal. Finally, the fourth and last item of business is the advisory vote on the frequency of the vote on our named executive officer compensation. As noted in the proxy statement, the Board of Directors recommends an advisory vote to occur every three years. We will now pause for any questions from our shareholders on any of these proposals.
Angelo, have we received any questions? No questions were received on the proposals, Jay. All right. Well, then, thank you. The polls for each proposal are now closed.
I'll be turning the meeting back to Angelo to provide preliminary voting results.
Thanks, Jay. Based on the preliminary vote totals, each of Jay Farner, Jennifer Gilbert, and Jonathan Mariner has been elected as a class one director. The proposal to ratify the appointment of Ernst and Young as our independent registered public accounting firm for 2021 has been approved. The advisory vote on our named executive officer compensation was approved, and every three years was approved as the recommended frequency of the advisory vote on our named executive officer compensation. The inspector of elections will confirm the final vote count, and we will file this report in our corporate records with the minutes of this meeting.
In addition, we will include the final voting results in a current report on form eight k filed with the SEC within four business days.
Okay. Now as the formal business to be conducted at this meeting is now complete, and the annual meeting is adjourned. Angelo will now provide some further remarks, following which I will give a brief presentation, and we will conclude with a question and answer period.
Before Jay begins, I want to remind you that any persons speaking on behalf of Rocket Companies may make forward looking statements. For more information about factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from forward looking statements, please refer to the risks described in our filings with the SEC, particularly in the section of these documents titled Risk Factors. The commentary today may also include non GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations between GAAP and non GAAP metrics can be found in our earnings releases as well as in our filings with the SEC, all of which are available on our Investor Relations website at ir.rocketcompanies.com. I now turn the meeting back to Jay.
Thank you, Angelo. Before we cover our successes from the past year, I wanna take a moment and thank our team members, thousands of whom are also shareholders, for the dedication and unwavering commitment to our clients. None of the things we will talk about today would be possible without them. I'd also like to thank all the investors who are with us today. We appreciate your support and belief in our mission.
We are a company that is driven to create value for our shareholders. Some days, the markets recognize and reward the value we've created. At other times, it does not. What's important for you, our investors, is to know that we will not be deterred in achieving our goals. You have witnessed the success we've achieved over the past year and understand our vision of simplifying some of life's most complicated financial transactions.
We will continue to run our business with a focus on enabling future growth and believe our investors will be rewarded over the long run. During the IPO process, we spoke about our mission to create certainty for clients in their most complex moments. There are many opportunities ahead for rocket companies as we execute on that goal. The markets we serve are massive, representing nearly one third of The U. S.
GDP. They're highly fragmented, and we're still in the early innings of digital transformation, a transformation that Rocket Companies is leading the way in. Rocket Companies is far and away the largest mortgage lender in the nation, but that's not where the story ends. We're using the knowledge that we've gained and the lessons we've learned over the last three and a half decades to propel us to the same position in real estate, title, auto sales, and personal loans. As the mortgage market shifts to be more purchase focused, we're ready to serve Americans with a real estate solution.
Once consumers enter our platform through Rocket Homes, they're likely to stay in the ecosystem to get their home financing and title. Plus, we're proud of our net client retention rate of more than 90%, meaning our clients will come back to Rocket Mortgage when planning to buy a new home, refinance that home, or use us to purchase their next car. The tremendous business results we've delivered since our IPO have been years in the making and are supported by four key pillars on our platform: our ROCCAT technology, the strength of our national brand, the sales professionals who make up our ROCCAT cloud force and our data science foundation. So to recap, a few recent highlights for you. In the last twelve months, Rocket Company has generated more than $19,000,000,000 in revenue and $12,600,000,000 in EBITDA.
2021 was the sixth consecutive quarter that we at least doubled our closed loan volume year over year. During 2020, there were more than 150,000,000 unique visitors to Rocket Company's online properties. And we helped more than 1,100,000 clients with their mortgage, automotive, real estate or personal loan needs. In the most recent quarter, more than 60,000,000 unique users visited Rocket Company's online properties, up 72% from the 2020. In addition, Rocket Mortgage generated over $100,000,000,000 in closed loan volume.
Amrock completed a record of nearly 350,000 closings. Rocket Auto generated an annual run rate of more than 1,000,000,000 in gross merchandise value, and unique average monthly visitors to our rockethomes.com site increased by 300% year over year. Looking ahead, I'm incredibly excited by the potential of Rocket's platform to expand client lifetime value through through the unique relationships and mind share that we've solidified with our clients. We've set a goal to become the number one retail home purchase lender in America within the next twenty four months. Additionally, we expect Rocket Auto and Rocket Homes to double in size during 2021.
We are investing in the company for the long run. And again, we appreciate your continued support as shareholders. With that, I'll turn it back over to Angelo for the general Q and A portion of today's meeting.
We have one question.
Julie, can you tell us
how you're currently thinking about capital allocation, including issuing a dividend?
Yes. Thanks for the question. This is Julie Booth, CFO of Rocket Companies, responding. And as I have talked about in the past, our first priority when we think about our capital is to maintain a strong balance sheet. And investing back in the business is the first place that we're going to go to deploy that capital.
Whether that is investment in our brand or technology or potential acquisitions, we look to deploy capital in a way that is additive to our business. And from there, we have the opportunity to return some capital to our shareholders. We paid a special dividend earlier this year, and we also have a $1,000,000,000 buyback program in place. We'll continue to consider both of these options depending on the current environment. And we're confident in our business, and we'll continue to allocate capital to grow our business and drive long term value.
There
are no further questions. Jay?
Alright. Well, thank you. And with that, I'll conclude the meeting.