Mortgage Jobs Rose in November

Mortgage lenders added 4,300 full-time employees to their payrolls in November, according to the December employment report released Jan. 7 by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.The BLS report shows that jobs in the mortgage banking/broker sector rose from 464,500 in October to 468,800 in November. (There is a one-month lag in BLS reporting of mortgage-sector employment data. The December data will not be released until Feb. 4.) Employment in the mortgage finance sector has been rising since August, and Friday's jobs report indicated that the hiring would continue in December. "Over the year, strength in the housing market continued to stimulate hiring in the [financial services] industry," the BLS said. "Credit intermediation added 9,000 jobs in December, bringing the total to 64,000 for all of the year." Meanwhile, the BLS report showed that the U.S. economy generated 157,000 new jobs in December, and the unemployment rate was unchanged at 5.4%. The BLS can be found online at http://stats.bls.gov.