Employment data

The gain reinforces other estimates that suggest more work-intensive purchase originations have spurred companies to increase staffing. Hiring addressing changing needs in servicing may come next.

The tool is designed to help lenders adjust their underwriting to address the growing faction of non-W2 employees, which is expected to make up half of the workforce by 2027.

The plateau in non-depository estimates for new jobs in the field reported Friday follows anecdotal accounts of reorganization by banks and nonbanks in the past week.

Even though volumes are expected to taper from 2020’s record highs, lenders plan to take on more employees in 2021, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association and McLagan Data.

So far companies plan on using roughly the same number of employees as they shift from handling payment suspensions to assessing borrowers who have seen long-term declines in their incomes.

In the aftermath of 2020’s historic year of mortgage originations, lenders are concerned with keeping employees and insulating themselves from the negative effects of the boom and bust cycle, according to a survey from The Mortgage Collaborative.

The more gradual upward drift in job numbers this year may hint at a slight softening in the market that analysts have flagged.

The relatively small addition of 266,000 positions to the broader market in April suggests that income uncertainty, which could impact some borrowers’ ability to qualify for or pay loans, could become a concern among lenders and brokers.

Also, per-loan compensation keeps dropping due to the persistence of refinancing in the mix but it could rise as the purchase share of the market increases.

A cross-training strategy that hasn’t been widely used since the Great Recession is coming back into vogue among outsourcers.