Fintech mortgage lender Better.com has abruptly shut down its real estate business.
According to a TechCrunch report, the company laid off its entire real estate division on June 7 and will shift operations from an in-house agent model to a partnership agent model. TechCrunch cited an unnamed individual “impacted by the move” who claimed Better.com’s agents received “little to no severance…after getting a more than 50% salary cut in November in order to ‘ensure’ our jobs to come.”
While it was cited on LinkedIn’s list of the “50 Best Startups to Work for In 2020,” Better.com earned a reputation for human resources callousness when it used a Zoom call in December 2021 to lay off roughly 900 employees. The New York City-based company laid off smaller waves of employees from August through December of last year.
Better.com has been making headlines for its layoffs since it first gained notoriety by laying off about 900 employees over Zoom on December 1, 2021. It has since been laying off smaller groups very systematically, say sources. Last August, TechCrunch also reported the fact that Better.com had conducted its fourth round of layoffs since the previous December. The company’s internal problems have repeatedly delayed its merger with the special purpose acquisition company Aurora Acquisition Corp. (NASDAQ: AURC) that would turn Better.com into a publicly traded company – that deal is now scheduled to close at the end of the third quarter of this year.
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