Keller Williams, the Austin-based real estate franchise giant, has implemented yet another round of layoffs in its lending arm, Keller Mortgage.
Keller Mortgage scaled up rapidly last year before laying off 150 recent recruits in October, according to Inman. Although the scale of these latest layoffs was still unclear at press time, more than a dozen Keller Mortgage employees posted notices on LinkedIn Tuesday that they’d been laid off, describing the job cuts as “big,” “massive” and “huge.”
“In light of current market conditions, we have restructured the operations and support groups within our Keller Mortgage business,” a spokesman for Keller Williams confirmed. They declined to provide details about exactly how many people were let go, however.
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Keller Mortgage is advertising a number of openings for loan officers to work remotely from anywhere in the U.S., even as it lays workers off.
“We remain committed to assisting our impacted employees and to growing our mortgage offerings over the long term,” said Keller Williams’ director of public relations and media relations Darryl Frost in an email to Inman.
Several other mortgage lenders — including Better, Pennymac, Guaranteed Rate, Mr. Cooper, and Wells Fargo — have downsized in recent months to adjust to lower refinancing volume, and the nation’s largest mortgage lender, Rocket, expects buyout offers it has made to 2,000 employees will save $180 million a year, according to Inman.
Purchase mortgages make up most of Keller Mortgage’s business, and the company nearly doubled its payroll to 1,000 employees last year, anticipating growth in purchase mortgage lending that may not have materialized.
“We’re committed to our long-term growth and so we’re currently expanding our sales team nationally,” Frost said.
In reporting its first-quarter results, KW said its agents closed $108.4 billion in sales, up 10.5 percent from a year ago, but that the number of transactions was down 5.2 percent, to 258,400.
The company did not provide any details about Keller Mortgage in its earnings report.
[Inman] — James Bell