A monthly expansion in the size of the mortgage broker workforce wasn’t enough to push mortgage headcount higher. In the overall job market, employers filled more positions last month.
At the end of August, there were 149,279,000 nonfarm employees on the payrolls of U.S. businesses and organizations, according to data released Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
That worked out to 201,000 more employed people than one month earlier.
Growth in national staffing increased from July, when a downwardly revised 147,000 jobs were added to nonfarm payrolls.
But employment growth weakened from the upwardly revised 221,000 in August 2017.
Last month’s unemployment rate was 3.9 percent, the same as it was in July but lower than the 4.4 percent rate reported for August 2017.
The labor participation rate fell to 62.7 percent from 62.9 percent a month earlier and a year earlier.
August 2018’s hourly wage averaged $27.16, ten cents more than in July and 77 cents more than in August 2017.
Non-bank staffing within just the
mortgage industry, which the BLS reports on a one-month delay, concluded July at 345,300 people. Headcount in home lending was down by a hundred employees from the preceding month.
But the mortgage jobs total expanded from a downwardly revised 339,100 people a year previous.
The latest mortgage staffing numbers included 253,300 employees classified as “real estate credit,” falling 300 jobs from the upwardly revised figure for the June report.
But the number of “mortgage and non-mortgage loan brokers”
grew, to 92,000 from a downwardly revised 91,800.
Utilizing an extrapolation of mortgage origination market share data, Mortgage Daily estimates that total mortgage industry employment — including positions at financial institutions — was around 707,100 as of July 31.
The overall industry estimate included 297,000 home-lending employees at banks, 64,900 mortgage jobs at credit unions and the 345,300 non-bank jobs reported by the BLS.
