Vishal Garg's Better.com announces layoffs again, shuts down entire real estate team

Better.com, the online mortgage lender, has laid off its entire real estate team and shut down the unit, according to a report by TechCrunch. The layoffs reportedly affected around 4000 employees in US and India since 2021 as the company has earlier done a lot of layoffs.

This is the second round of layoffs at Better.com in less than a year. In December 2021, the company laid off 900 employees, or about 9% of its workforce, in a Zoom call that went viral.

The latest layoffs come as the mortgage market has cooled off. Interest rates have been rising, and the housing market has been slowing down. This has led to a decline in demand for mortgages, which has hurt Better.com's business.

One of the employees who was laid off from the company revealed that they got “little to no severance, after getting a more than 50 percent salary cut in November in order to ‘ensure’ our jobs to come".

According to reports, Better.com was going to transition from an in-house agent strategy to a partnership agent model.

Amazon recently signed an agreement with the firm in March 2023 to allow employees to utilise their shares as a down payment on a mortgage.

Garg stated that Amazon employees can finance their homes without giving up their shares.

"Even though equity is a valuable asset, it is considered ineligible by most banks and financial institutions when calculating the necessary down payment on a home," he said.

According to Better.com, the unpredictable mortgage market conditions created an exceptionally difficult operating environment for some sector organisations.

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