Better.com announces layoffs ahead of public debut

Better.com, a New York-based digital mortgage lender, is laying off roughly 9% of its 10,000 staff ahead of its public launch. The move, according to the company’s chief financial officer Kevin Ryan, will allow for a “fortress balance sheet and a reduced and focused workforce” setting the company up to “play offense going into a radically evolving home ownership market.”

Why should we care?
Anonymous sources within the company said the layoffs were a response to expectations of a mortgage market contraction after 18 months of expansion driven by low interest rates. Better.com reportedly had “too many people in the wrong places,” and technology was increasingly replacing the work of humans. The news, however, was reportedly delivered as “affected workers were abruptly summoned into a mass webinar,” a report suggested. “They dumped us like trash. We were there since the beginning and worked hard for the company and for our roles,” one of the laid off employees was quoted as saying. Despite adding thousands of jobs this year, the company hasn’t yet reached profitable status. The company has expressed that it may not be able to maintain its growth rate from earlier in the pandemic, when low interest rates caused many consumers to refinance their mortgages. Better.com recently got a $750M cash infusion in a new agreement with its special-purpose acquisition company backers.