During breaks in nearly every televised basketball game, it’s there: Tracy Morgan imploring pensive homebuyers “pretty sure” is not enough, and that they can only be certain about their giant life choice with Rocket Mortgage.

“Find the right mortgage with a local broker and Rocket technology,” intoned the narrator on the commercials, which premiered during the Super Bowl.

The ads are mostly set not in a loan office, but a home showing. That raises a question of perhaps little interest to National Basketball Association fans but a great deal of interest to National Association of Realtors members – where is the real estate agent in this picture?

Rocket rocketed to being the highest volume mortgage lender in the country by late 2017. They surpassed Well Fargo through persistent marketing (ginning up interest in the Rocket app), robust customer service and benefited from industry-wide retreat from the depository banks. 

Rocket has since rode the wave of famously low interest-rates, which juiced the mortgage refinancing market. The company created by Dan Gilbert went public last year, and it reported a cushy $6.6 billion in profits through the first nine months of 2020.

But a company like Rocket – both ambitious and these days heavily reliant to the refi revenue stream – is looking for ways to get more purchase business, and one of them is real estate.