Texana Bank, startup Flyhomes announce layoffs

A bank lender and mortgage startup are the latest firms to announce layoffs as the industry watches mortgage application volumes fall to lows not seen since 2000. 

Texana Bank, based in Texarkana, Texas, will terminate 58 employees on Sept. 5, all but one of them in mortgage roles at the lender’s Irvine, California, office, according to a California Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification filing last week. The cuts include 22 mortgage loan officers and 10 senior mortgage loan processors, as well as four vice presidents overseeing mortgage operations. 

The WARN notice did not describe the reason for the terminations, and a company representative at the firm’s mortgage main office in Southlake, Texas, declined to comment in a phone call Wednesday. 

Texana Bank lists branches across East Texas and Arkansas and offers conventional products as well as jumbo, home equity, land, refinance and mobile home loans. 

Flyhomes, a Seattle-based lender with cash offer and buy-before-you-sell products, laid off 20% of its staff Wednesday, a company spokesperson confirmed. The startup founded in 2016 operates in eight states and Washington, D.C., has raised $190 million and claims it has reached over $3.7 billion in volume. 

“The past few months have brought the largest interest rate hike in nearly 30 years, and that has impacted the demand for housing,” the firm said in a LinkedIn post Wednesday. “The extremely difficult, but necessary, step we took today was necessary to address market conditions that have not been seen in the recent past.”

The layoffs were first reported by GeekWire.

A spokesperson Thursday declined to disclose the total number of workers impacted, although the company indicates it has 763 staff members on LinkedIn. Wednesday’s statement said departing employees were offered exit packages, but the spokesperson declined to elaborate on details. 

Flyhomes claims it was the first company to make all-cash offers available to consumers at scale, offering the product in 2017. It’s the most recent cash-offer lender to shed workers in the rising rate environment, after New York-based Orchard and Austin-based UpEquity announced layoffs last month.

Mortgage firms have cut thousands of professionals since the beginning of the year in response to volume falling off a cliff following interest rate hikes, home price growth and refinances all-but bottoming out. The Federal Reserve’s 75-basis-point hike in June was its largest since 1994 and Fed Chairman Jerome Powell has indicated a similar hike this month, prompting widespread concern of a recession next year.