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JPMorgan Chase & Co. laid off hundreds of home mortgage employees and is reassigning hundreds more as the impacts of rising interest rates and falling residential deal volume proliferate throughout the U.S.
About 1,000 employees in all will be affected, sources told Bloomberg. Half of those workers will be moved to other divisions at the company, but the other half are looking for new jobs.
Chase isn't alone, according to Bloomberg. Wells Fargo & Co., the biggest mortgage lender among banks in the U.S., has done the same with an undisclosed number of employees working in home mortgages, sources told Bloomberg.
“Our staffing decision this week was a result of cyclical changes in the mortgage market,” a JPMorgan spokesperson told Bloomberg.
Market forces impacting housing include rising mortgage rates, still-climbing prices, fewer existing homes sold and growing fears that a housing market slump is on the horizon.
Mortgage rates are about 6% — their highest levels since 2008, according to The Washington Post — making the cost of borrowing to buy a home significantly more expensive than it was just weeks ago. Sales of existing homes declined in May for the fourth month running, down to an annualized rate of 5.41 million units, according to the National Association of Realtors.
Sale prices were a different story, with the median existing-home sales price making the unprecedented move of topping $400K, hitting about $407K — a nearly 15% increase over the previous year, the NAR found. The association’s measure of affordability was the lowest it has been since 2007, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Prices for other housing types — namely, rentals — were also up as priced-out, would-be homeowners remain tenants. Multifamily rents have been posting record gains, with their biggest gains since the onset of the pandemic coming just last month. Single-family rents were up 14% year-over-year nationwide in April, Bisnow has reported.
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