Ocwen Financial Corp. has a history of acquiring mortgage servicing businesses and subsequently slashing headcount, and its acquisition of Homeward Residential Holdings Inc. is no exception.
When Ocwen acquired Saxon Mortgage Services Inc. from Morgan Stanley in April of last year, 680 Saxon employees in North Texas were laid off a month later.
In 2010, Ocwen subsidiary Ocwen Loan Servicing LLC acquired HomEq Servicing from Barclays Bank PLC. That acquisition was followed by 905 HomEq layoffs in California and 242 layoffs in North Carolina.
Ocwen completed its acquisition of Homeward from WL Ross & Co. LLC in December. The transaction added around $77 billion in mortgage servicing rights to Ocwen’s servicing portfolio, which stood around $127 billion as of Sept. 30, 2012.
In 2009, Homeward, then known as American Home Mortgage Servicing Inc., said it employed more than 3,000 people.
On Tuesday, a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification filed with the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity indicated that 370 employees of Homeward Residential Inc. are being laid off.
The impacted staff are in Jacksonville, Fla.
The notice indicates that the layoffs will begin on April 15 and be completed by Aug. 15.
Some of the work currently being performed by the Jacksonville employees is likely to wind up offshore.
A report released last year from Moody’s Investors Service indicated that Atlanta-based Ocwen’s headcount — which has tripled over the prior two years to 5,063 as of May 31, 2012 — included 843 employees in the United States, 4,141 people in India and 79 employees in Uruguay.
A report in November from Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services said that while many servicers have been scaling back on offshore staffing, both Ocwen Loan Servicing LLC and Homeward Residential Inc. “are among the few such companies we rate that have found that the benefits of offshoring outweigh the potential complications.”
