Mortgage Banking Jobs Stabilizing?

Mortgage brokerage firms cut 4,100 employees in January, while employment at mortgage banking companies appeared to stabilize, according to a government jobs report. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 3,900 full-time employees in the mortgage banker/broker sector lost their jobs in January. Total employment in the sector fell from 368,800 in December to 364,900 in January. Over the past 12 months, mortgage bankers have cut their payrolls by 25% and eliminated 86,700 jobs, while 23,900, or 17%, of the brokers counted by the BLS have lost their jobs or left the sector. But the recent uptick in refinancings along with rising defaults and workout cases that are straining servicing departments must have forced mortgage banking companies to stop cutting, at least for now. They added 200 workers to their payroll in January. Friday's job report also shows that the troubled homebuilding industry has lost 346,000 jobs since September 2006. Homebuilders laid off 14,400 employees in February, and residential specialty trade contracts cut another 16,300 employees. (There is a one-month lag in the BLS's reporting of jobs data on the mortgage industry.) The BLS can be found online at http://stats.bls.gov.