Loan firms lay off 24,000 since Aug. 1

At the North Carolina offices of mortgage lender HomeBanc Corp., Archie Clark is the only employee left. But in a few days, he'll be gone, too.

"It's pretty much a ghost town over there," Clark said. "Somebody went in and took the furniture from the lobby. I don't know who did that. I put some of the other stuff in the back and locked it up."

When Clark finishes helping movers from the company's Atlanta headquarters collect computers and other property, he'll join the more than 24,000 workers nationwide who have lost jobs in the financial services industry since the beginning of the month — with more than half coming since last Friday. With few exceptions, the cuts are the direct result of woes in the nation's housing market as a credit crunch started by subprime mortgages shrank demand for loans and left companies unable to fund themselves in the debt markets.

Since the start of the year, more than 38,000 workers have lost their jobs at mortgage lending institutions, according to recent company layoff announcements and data compiled by global outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. making it an employment collapse that threatens to rival the massive layoffs in the airline industry that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when some 100,000 employees lost their jobs.

In Utah, the impact has been on employees working in the local offices of national companies who have recently shuttered their doors.

"There are, in the wholesale market, a lot of people looking for jobs right now," said John Norman, executive director of the Utah Mortgage Lenders Association. "I don't know how many jobs have been lost in Utah, but I do know that most of the jobs have been lost in the wholesale market."

National companies with offices in Utah include: GreenPoint, Capital One's wholesale mortgage arm; Aegis; American Home Mortgage, whose wholesale arm was American Brokers Conduit (ABC); and First Magnus Financial Corp., which filed for bankruptcy this week.

In some cases, Norman said, the support workers, mainly underwriters and account executives, are landing at other, still operational Utah offices.

"As always, there are winners and losers when the market changes," he said. "Those companies that are still in business all tell me that their volume is up."

Still, experts say, things will likely continue to get worse for workers in the immediate future.

"It's far from over," said Bart Narter, a senior analyst with Celent, a Boston-based financial research and consulting firm. "The subprime lending collapse will continue to ripple through the financial sector."