Mortgage lender Better, the owner of UK mortgage outfit Trussle, is laying off 3,000 staff in the US and India.
This represents about 35% of the firm’s workforce and comes on the back of 900 layoffs back in December.
In July last year, Better picked up UK online mortgage broker Trussle for an undisclosed fee. There is no suggestion that the cuts seen in the US and India will affect the brokerage.
Better has been under fire for its treatment of staff with last year’s layoffs carried out over a Zoom video call.
And criticism of the handling of those terminations led CEO Vishal Garg to take a sabbatical to reflect on his leadership before returning in January.
However, the firm has made cuts again with its CFO announcing cuts in an email to staff yesterday.
Once more the handling of the layoffs was not without controversy with staff having claimed a severance tab appeared on their Workday payment app before they were informed of the cuts.
CFO Kevin Ryan, who penned the letter, put the layoffs down to the “rapidly changing residential real estate market” and a “dramatic drop in origination volume due to rising interest rates”.
Exiting and former employees of the firm have taken to social media and message boards to criticise the firm.
Last year the firm also acquired UK-based startup Property Partner. Launched in 2015, Property Partner enables fractional ownership of “buy to let” properties. Again there is no suggestion either Property Partner or Trussle are impacted by these decisions.
Last September Trussle laid out plans to ramp up employment, announcing it would aim to hire 1,000 brokers in 2022.
