JPMORGAN Chase & Co cut hundreds of mortgage employees this week, adding to job losses across the industry as home-lending businesses continue to be hurt by elevated interest rates.

The reductions are tied to lower industry volumes and included some managers, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified discussing personnel decisions. JPMorgan’s mortgage-origination volume slumped 60 per cent last year as Federal Reserve rate hikes cooled a pandemic-era boom.

“As we’ve said in the past, we regularly review our business and customer needs and adjust our staffing accordingly — creating new roles where we see the need or reducing positions when appropriate,” a spokesperson for New York-based JPMorgan said in an emailed statement.

The housing market was pummelled last year as soaring borrowing costs sidelined would-be homebuyers. While a recent easing of mortgage rates has provided some help to shoppers, residential sales remain under pressure, with inventory tight as homeowners resist giving up their lower rates through the sale of their properties.

JPMorgan’s latest cuts add to the thousands of reductions across the mortgage industry over the past year. The bank dismissed hundreds of employees and reassigned hundreds more in June, with further reductions later in the year. Rival Wells Fargo & Co, the biggest mortgage lender among US banks, cut thousands in home lending last year. Nonbank lenders have been slashing their ranks as well.

At JPMorgan, “we continue to hire in many other areas and work hard to redeploy impacted employees”, the representative said. “In the last year alone, we added more than 22,000 jobs.” BLOOMBERG

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