Mortgage Jobs Keep Rising

Mortgage companies continued to add new full-time employees to their payrolls in July, bringing the total of new hires over the past 12 months to 45,100.Lenders hired 4,800 new employees in July, according to the August employment report released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, as jobs in the mortgage banking/broker sector rose from 517,100 in June to 521,900 in July. (There is a one-month lag in BLS reporting of mortgage sector employment data. The August data will be released Oct. 7.) Employment has been steadily rising over the past 12 months, and record home sales, along with a high level of refinancings, could make 2005 the second-best year ever for originations. Jay Brinkmann, financial economist for the Mortgager Bankers Association, pointed out that purchase-mortgage transactions are more labor intensive than refinancings, placing more demands on loan officers and back-office personnel. He also noted that heavy subprime volumes could be prompting more hires. Meanwhile, the U.S. economy generated 169,000 new jobs in August and the unemployment rate edged down to 4.9% from 5.0% in July. BLS economists also revised the July jobs number upward from 207,000 to 242,000 in the Sept. 2 report. The BLS can be found online at http://stats.bls.gov.