A subsidiary of General Motors Co. has confirmed that it is working with Dan Gilbert's team on a large-scale mixed-use development east of the Renaissance Center in downtown Detroit.

Riverfront Holdings Inc., which owns the RenCen, said in a statement to Crain's on Friday afternoon that it is in negotiations with Gilbert's Detroit-based Rock Ventures LLC to develop about 10 acres of vacant land that's currently being used as surface parking.

"The partners plan to redevelop the land into a mixed-use complex of residential, office and retail," the statement said.

Additional details about the planned project — including size, precise location as well as timeframe — were not released.

Crain's first reported in November 2015 that a development in that area is in the works between the Detroit-based automaker and Gilbert, who in the last five years has bought more than 90 properties in and around downtown Detroit totaling more than 15 million square feet.

Sources said at the time that the development was planned on about 20-25 acres.

GM's plans to develop the area east of the RenCen go back at least a decade to around 2006, when the automaker tapped Chicago-based real estate companies Mesirow Stein Real Estate Inc. and Morningside Equities Group to develop a 13-acre property for the River East project into retail and residential space.

At the time, Matt Cullen, currently the principal of Rock Ventures and CEO of Jack Entertainment LLC (and chairman of the Detroit RiverFront Conservancy board of directors), was the general manager of GM's Economic Development and Enterprise Services division.

Gilbert's other planned projects include a two-block development east of the former Compuware Corp. headquarters downtown where his Quicken Loans Inc. is headquartered; a development on the vacant two-acre site of the former J.L. Hudson's department store on Woodward; and a Major League Soccer stadium flanked by three 18- to 28-story towers with office, residential and hotel uses in a $1 billion project on the site of the half-built Wayne County Consolidated Jail project.

The property east of the RenCen is generally the same area where Gilbert briefly considered building a new headquarters building for Quicken Loans employees totaling about 300,000 square feet a decade ago.

Messages sent to spokespeople for Gilbert's Bedrock LLC real estate company and Rock Ventures were not returned.

In an interview with Crain's last month, Gilbert said the riverfront was among the areas in greater downtown that are primed for new construction.