Mortgage banking and brokerage firms added 1,800 full-time employees to their payrolls in March after adding 1,900 in the prior month.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday that employment in the mortgage banking/broker sector rose to 286,300 in April from 284,500 in March.
This marks the third consecutive month of employment gains at nonbank mortgage firms, which appear to be attracting more business as they soften lending standards.
"If you look at the large lenders, they are very conservative," according to Svenja Gudell, senior director of Economic Research at Zillow. "If you go to the small ones they are a bit looser. They are taking on a bit more risk than the larger guys," she said in an interview earlier this week.
Meanwhile, the second quarter is expected to be the best quarter of 2015 in terms of originations, according to economists at the Mortgage Bankers Association. Their latest forecast calls for single-family originations to peak at $378 billion in the second quarter and drop back to $318 billion in the third quarter and $272 billion in the fourth quarter.
However, economists at Wells Fargo Securities are betting that home sales and new-home construction "will be an upside surprise" this year, because homeowners are getting the itch to sell. "Word is getting out that right now is a pretty good time to put your home up on the market," according to a June 1 WFS report.
Overall, the U.S. economy created 280,000 new jobs in May, compared with 119,000 in April, according to Friday's jobs report. (The BLS revised its April figure upward from its initial report.)
However, the unemployment rate ticked up to 5.5% in May.
"Don't sweat the unemployment rate rise to 5.5% from a revised 5.4% for April," said Scott Anderson, chief economist at Bank of the West. "The increase was driven by a healthy increase in the labor force participation rate to 62.9% as discouraged workers re-entered the labor force," he said in a note to clients Friday morning.
(There is a one-month lag in the Bureau of Labor Statistics reporting of mortgage employment data.)
