Chicago-based mortgage lender Guaranteed Rate has laid off about 180 employees around the country — including about 30 in Chicago — after the amount of new mortgage loans the company funded dipped in 2017.
Before the layoffs, the company employed about 3,600 employees nationally, about 1,1,00 of them in Chicago, spokeswoman Valerie Dolenga said. The employees were notified last week and early this week, and the terminations were immediate.
"We recently made the decision to rebalance our organization in areas where we were overstaffed, resulting in some positions being eliminated," Guaranteed Rate said in a statement provided by Dolenga. "The move improves our competitive positioning and allows us to be even more aggressive in providing the best mortgage rates for our customers."
The affected employees included operations assistants, who helped move loan paperwork through the pipeline, Dolenga said.
The company funded $19 billion in new mortgage loans in 2017, down from $22 billion in 2016. Dolenga said the layoffs were not related to the dip in new mortgage loans, and the statement from Guaranteed Rate said it expects 2018 will be its largest year in total funded loan volume.
Guaranteed Rate has been steadily growing its workforce over the years, and plans to continue. It hired 120 loan officers in January and February, and plans to hire another 1,500 throughout the year, Dolenga said. In 2016, it employed about 3,200 people nationally, up from 620 a decade before.
The mortgage lender has received about $3 million in tax credits from the state for creating 443 new full-time jobs, according to the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity. It entered into a tax credit agreement in July 2010 as part of the Economic Development for a Growing Economy, or EDGE, program, which provides tax breaks for companies that promise to create jobs in Illinois.
Guaranteed Rate, which in 2016 bought naming rights to the White Sox stadium in a deal valued at $25.1 million, now has about 220 offices across the U.S.
In December, the company announced that it is selling a minority stake to Boston-based private equity firm
