JPMorgan Chase &Â Co. is investing more in California, and some of that investment is in mortgage production.
The New York-based firm made its foray into the Golden State with its September 2008 acquisition of Washington Mutual Bank after the Office of Thrift Supervision threw the former West Coast giant into receivership.
In April 2011, the bank announced plans to expand its California staff by more than 1,500 employees by the end of the year. A small minority of those jobs were “mortgage officers.”
Now Chase says it plans to recruit 1,200 people in California.
“We plan to invest significantly in the people, facilities and technology needed to serve California consumers and businesses well,” Pablo Sanchez, who is head of Chase’s branch network in the Western United States, said in the announcement. “We are creating many jobs, including construction workers to build the branches, vendors to provide services to Chase and, most importantly, branch employees to help our customers with their financial needs.”
The jobs also include loan originators.
About 165 of the new staff will be loan officers, a Chase spokesman said in a statement.
Chase, which reported $146 billion in 2011 originations, said it has 14,000 branch employees in California, up from 12,000 in April 2011.
Also in the West, Chase said in August of last year it would add 400 employees during 2011 in San Diego and Riverside, Calif., though relatively few were expected to be mortgage positions, while it announced in November a recruiting campaign for 310 Tempe, Ariz., mortgage employees.
Nearly half of the 175 branches the banking behemoth plans to open across the country this year will be in California. Those branches will include locations in Fresno, Los Angeles and San Francisco. After the new branches are in place, Chase said it will operate more than a thousand branches in the state, up from more than 900 as of last April.
California saw 18 homeownership centers opened during the past three years at Chase.
The third-party servicing portfolio finished last year at $902 billion, while Chase owned another $198 billion in home loans.
