Quote from The Kin:
You have no idea how wrong you are. The mortgage brokering industry is actually one of the few segments of the Real Estate industry that is booming due to a flood of homeowners looking to refinance thanks to interest rates dropping and ARMs resetting.
There are also very few mortgage brokers on Wall Street. It seems like these cuts will affect everyone.
Here is a piece from a USA today article from some time last year showing 40,000 job losses in the mortgage industry. It is worse now. This took me about ten seconds to find as there are so many such articles.
Mortgage job losses surpass 40,000
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CHARLOTTE (AP) â At the North Carolina offices of mortgage lender HomeBanc Corp., Archie Clark is the only employee left. But in a few days, he'll be gone, too. When Clark finishes helping movers from the company's Atlanta headquarters collect computers and other property, he'll join the more than 25,000 workers nationwide who have lost jobs in the financial services industry since the beginning of the month â with more than half coming since last Friday.
With few exceptions, the cuts are the direct result of woes in the nation's housing market.
More layoffs are announced daily. On Wednesday, Lehman Bros. (LEH) closed its "subprime" mortgage business, laying off 1,200 workers at 23 offices; Scottsdale, Ariz.-based 1st National Bank closed its wholesale mortgage unit and cut 541 jobs, and Accredited Home Lenders added 1,600 positions to the heap. The night before, banking giant HSBC (HBC) said it would close a main financing office and cut 600 jobs.
Since the start of the year, more than 40,000 workers have lost their jobs at mortgage lending institutions, according to recent company layoff announcements and data complied by global outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. Meanwhile, construction companies have announced nearly 20,000 job cuts this year, while the National Association of Realtors expects membership rolls to decline this year for the first time in a decade.