Source: Seattle Times —
The cooling housing market is driving yet another round of layoffs at a Seattle-based company.
The online real estate brokerage Redfin plans to lay off 862 employees nationwide and shut down its house-flipping business, RedfinNow, the company announced Wednesday. The layoffs will cut the company’s workforce by at least 13% and include 75 jobs in Washington.
The cuts are “awful but we can’t avoid it,” CEO Glenn Kelman told employees in an email sent before 6 a.m. PST. The cuts come in response to the slowing housing market, Kelman wrote, and “this layoff assumes the downturn will last at least through 2023.”
Kelman thanked departing employees. “I’m sorry that we don’t have enough sales to keep paying you,” he wrote.
Workers will be laid off across several divisions of the company, including 264 people working on RedfinNow and 197 lead agents, about 9% of the company’s lead agents. Of the total cuts, 218 employees will be offered a different role at Redfin, a company spokesperson said.
The cuts follow an earlier round of nearly 500 layoffs at Redfin in June and scores of other job cuts across the real estate industry as fewer people buy homes and home prices begin to slide.
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