Dan Gilbert, who is leading Detroit's bid for Amazon.com Inc.'s second headquarters, touts the Detroit-Windsor region's selling points to the world's largest online retailer in a letter attached to the bid and obtained by Crain's.

The billionaire mortgage and real estate mogul used a retail sales pitch, promoting "lowest prices," "biggest selection" and "fastest delivery" for office space, much of which has not yet been built.

"If you build it, oh, they will come," Gilbert wrote in his letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and other executives. "... The road has been paved for Amazon. There is no better place for you to innovate and continue to improve the delivery of your customer experience."

Details about the bid, which was submitted to Amazon by a regional committee Oct. 19, have been largely shrouded in secrecy until now.

Complete coverage of the quest for Amazon HQ2

Full text of Gilbert's letter:

Dear Amazon,

We have studied you since you announced your intentions to open up HQ2 on September 7, 2017. In fact, we have done more than study you; we have become ‘obsessed’ with you. After all, you are our customer.

What we are proudly selling you today is:

Detroit, Michigan

If you are similar to your own customers, then you care about these same three things:

· Lowest prices

· Biggest selection

· Fastest delivery

Lowest Prices?

Detroit has the lowest prices and overall cost structure that you will find in any major urban core, including the cost of real estate, talent and taxes.

Biggest selection?

When it comes to real estate in a major downtown, you will not find more options than Detroit’s renovated and architecturally-acclaimed buildings in addition to its several large-scale, designed developments that are shovel-ready to go.

Fastest delivery?

We are ready to deliver to you a well-thought out package that meets all the requirements you expressed in the RFP, including the office requirements that you laid out for 2019 and in each year moving forward as you ramp up your HQ2 over an 8 or 9-year period. We have designed several viable paths for Amazon to lease/acquire 8 million+ square feet of downtown commercial real estate.

Don’t expect just fast delivery of your real estate needs. We also expect to deliver you access to high-quality talent from all directions where 50 million people and many of the world’s leading education institutions reside within a 5-hour drive or less.

If you build it, oh, they will come. But, the good news is that many of them are already here. For more detail, please read our response to your RFP as well as the larger, more detailed book enclosed in this package.

I represent a 65-member bid team that we put together within 24 hours of the HQ2 news coming out of Seattle. Mayors, the Governor, business leaders, foundations, suburbs, cities and Canada (just a half-mile across our river that incidentally has 3.5 miles of parks along its banks) worked together as one cohesive team fully engaged and enthusiastic about the prospect of locating HQ2 in downtown Detroit.

Detroit is ready to partner with Amazon and we are focused on a long-term approach of creating value for you, our city and the entire region.

We are gritty, innovative, curious and hard-working Midwesterners who are all joined in a mission of rebuilding our city into a unique, special place that creates the kind of positive environment where companies in the technology, ecommerce, autonomous transportation and aerospace sectors can thrive and prosper.

Incidentally, we happen to be a large fintech center as well.

The company I founded, Quicken Loans, now has 17,000+ full-time employees in downtown Detroit and has grown into the nation’s largest online home lender and 2nd largest overall mortgage provider.

Every person in our company believes in our mission of ‘doing well by doing good.’ We have impacted Detroit and so have many others who you will read about in the materials that are in your possession.

The road has been paved for Amazon. There is no better place for you to innovate and continue to improve the delivery of your customer experience. At the same time, we believe you will come to the conclusion that Detroit’s ecosystem is also ideal for you to develop new, creative products. ‘Making things’ is in our DNA here in the Motor City.

Every day we indeed are living ‘Day 1’ in Detroit. As you may know, unfortunately, Detroit found itself in ‘Day 2’ for far too long. But those days are long gone. We are ‘back to the future’ now and the learnings have been immeasurable.

Come to Detroit and visit us for one day and your heart, gut and intuition will feel the energy. Then the facts and data will confirm all that your soul feels. We are reinventing the place that invented inventing. We can think of no better partner or company than Amazon to join our mission.

Oh, and one more thing…

We have numerous ideas for how we can help add to Amazon’s growth story. We believe that you will find our deep and long-standing relationships with GM, Ford, Chrysler and others to be helpful to leverage Amazon’s products in the autonomous vehicle world and beyond. We also believe we can help AWS acquire large customers all over the Midwest and Canada. Another idea we recently discussed was the prospect of how we can partner with Amazon to put Echo/Alexa into the homes of millions of Quicken Loans Mortgage clients.

These are just a handful of the many ideas that we are excited to talk through with you. The value of ‘tying threads’ and making connections is an immeasurable, foundational piece of our Family of Companies cultural fabric. We don’t want to just host you in our city, we want to help grow your business.

Detroit is located at the intersection of muscles and brains. This is a place we believe Amazon will thrive and continue its legendary growth narrative. Come discover the opportunity that is called ‘Detroit’.

“There will always be serendipity involved in discovery.” – Jeff Bezos

Dan Gilbert

HQ2 Bid Committee Chair

Detroit, Michigan