It looks like the industry has rolled back more than half the staff added over the course of the pandemic.
Estimates for the number of people on mortgage banker and broker payrolls fell to 350.200 during January from a downwardly revised 353,500
How many more industry layoffs will come depends on mortgage companies' interest in retaining staff to handle the next interest rate drop that occurs, and their financial wherewithal.
"I think that mortgage banks, if they can, should hold on to people, because volume will eventually grow," said Melissa Cohn, a regional vice president at William Raveis Mortgage overseeing New York and Florida markets.
"The Fed will continue to raise rates until they get inflation down to 2%. When inflation goes down to 2%, mortgage rates are going to be significantly lower, and as I tell everyone on my team, every mortgage that we're making right now is going to be refinanced then. So we see the future volume, we just don't have it right now," she added.
Broader U.S. job numbers, which are reported with less of lag, were expected to put some upward pressure on rates just after their release because they were higher than anticipated, but their influence could be tempered by other developments, Cohn said. The Federal Reserve, which has been raising short-term rates and putting some upward pressure on long-term ones, has been doing so to try to quell inflation, and become more likely to continue doing so when signs of economic strength emerge, and less likely when indicators look weak.
Employers in the U.S. as a whole outpaced earlier estimates by adding 311,000 positions during February. Although this was higher than consensus estimates closer to 225,000 it was down from an usually strong 517,000 in January. Unemployment rose to 3.6% in February but it wasn't up that much compared to a 54-year low of 3.4% the previous month.
"The wage growth was more subdued, so that was good news [for rates]," Cohn said, noting the run on
"I know [monetary policy officials] are probably putting more credence on headcount, but I think that they look at subdued wages as an indication that there's a chink in the armor somewhere," she said.
Cohn said in an interview early Friday morning that the change in 10-year Treasury yield, which is roughly indicative of mortgage rates, might have been over 4% given the influence of the jobs count alone, but instead it was closer to 3.81% at the time of this writing.
While the BLS industry estimates this publication reports on primarily reflect nonbank jobs in housing finance, depositories like
