The mortgage morass has engulfed E-Loan, an online loan firm that said Monday it intends to cut more than 400 jobs at its Pleasanton headquarters as part of a restructuring.
Employees were notified at the end of last week they would be laid off. E-Loan, a unit of Puerto-Rico-based bank Popular, gave employees 60 days’ notice. Popular bought E-Loan in 2005 for $300 million.
E-Loan intends to jettison 410 of the roughly 925 jobs at its East Bay headquarters, said Laurie Azzano, an E-Loan spokeswoman.
“It’s a challenging mortgage climate for all of us right now,” Azzano said. In the past year, 8,100 East Bay jobs in four key industries tied directly to housing, residential construction, specialty trades construction, real estate and credit intermediation have vanished, she said.
In October alone, three mortgage companies eliminated 325 jobs. One of those, Diablo Funding Group, ceased operations. This month, failures in home equity loans forced Concord-based Cal State 9 credit union into a state-ordered conservatorship.
“E-Loan is not a subprime lender,” Azzano said. “The company has a higher-quality borrower. These layoffs are not a result of the subprime industry in particular but the mortgage problems as a whole.”
