Former American Home Mortgage workers struggle to find work

Every morning for nearly six months, Robin Rosenberg has started fresh at the computer in her Farmingdale apartment. She checks job-hunting Web sites for new postings, sends out resumes and letters of inquiry and makes phone calls. She is not particular about what field her next job will be in, and she's willing to take a $8,000 pay cut from her most recent salary.

But that's not enough, Rosenberg said, because she is one of the more than 2,300 financial industry workers on Long Island who have lost their jobs since October. She was laid off from her job in American Home Mortgage's loan sales department on Aug. 3, the same day the company abruptly terminated about 1,500 local employees.

"I know I could go into almost any job in any company and do a fantastic job, because I'm diligent, I'm a hard worker and I'm willing to learn," Rosenberg said. "But no one wants to give me that chance."


At 45, Rosenberg had been in the mortgage industry for 10 years and in lending for 20, but she is confident her skills could work in another industry, if only the job market wasn't so competitive.

For Dom Whelan, American Home's failure was a family affair. The 28-year-old had worked there almost five years. His mother, Susan, also an American Home employee, had been in the mortgage industry for 25 years; and his brother, Matthew, worked there as well.

None has found permanent employment yet, and he estimated that 75 percent of the former colleagues he's still in touch with are out of work.

Like Rosenberg, Whelan has spent months job-hunting on the Internet, approaching local companies and going to job fairs, which he said look like a "high school reunion."

By now, Whelan is frustrated. "I can send my resume to 1,000 different places," he said, "but you always have to know someone."

After mass layoffs at American Home, Woodbury-based Delta Financial Corp. and numerous other mortgage-related companies both large and small, Whelan and Rosenberg feel strongly that there are simply too many job seekers for every position available -- even for those who are flexible about salary and willing to change fields.

They are not alone. Employers in related fields report seeing so many applications for each opening that they are forced to turn away highly qualified candidates.

But Pearl Kamer, chief economist for the Long Island Association, said the anecdotal reports don't reflect the broader picture: Long Island actually suffers a labor shortage, she said, and unemployment remains low, 3.6 percent in October.

That means "anybody who was laid off and who has a decent set of skills ... will be picked up quite quickly," Kamer said. She said Long Island could face economic hardship if unemployment rises and other industries falter. But for now, Kamer said she believes there are enough jobs to go around.

Gary Huth, the state Labor Department's principal economist for the Long Island region, agreed, calling the mortgage industry layoffs "a blip" that has largely been absorbed.

Shelley Domotor would seem to be a case in point. At 62, she had moved to Melville from Dallas so shortly before American Home's bankruptcy that her furniture hadn't even arrived when she lost her job. But for Domotor, an enthusiastic and immediate job search paid off: Within six weeks, she had landed a position in regulatory compliance at Vertical Lend, a Melville-based company specializing in reverse mortgages.

But Domotor said that after 24 years in the mortgage industry, including three major downturns, she knows finding a new job is largely "the luck of the draw -- being in the right place at the right time."

Out of the eight or nine former colleagues she talks to, she said, six are still looking for work. They will have exhausted their unemployment benefits by the end of January.

She said leaving the business is not as easy as it sounds.

"The mortgage industry gets in your system," she said, in a way that outsiders don't understand. They also have trouble understanding some of the quirks that may surface on her less fortunate friends' resumes, she said.

"People outside of the mortgage business looked at my resume and said, 'Why have you had so many jobs?' But for us that's normal," she said.

Jonathan Pinard, head of the Empire State Mortgage Bankers Association, said, "It's really hard to get out of the mortgage business after you've been doing it for a long time. We are all creatures of habit, and we do get specialized."

For Joseph Willen, the layoffs have presented a great opportunity. Willen is president of the Advantage Group, a diversified, Huntington Station firm with operations in title insurance, foreclosure, settlement and mortgage origination.

"If we put an ad in the paper, we're flooded with calls and resumes," Willen said. "There were times in the past where we would hardly get any."

But he said he has turned away numerous qualified applicants, and he knows it's a buyer's market.

"Let's face it," Willen said. "It's supply and demand. From an employer's perspective, it's a really good situation to be in ... but job-seekers don't have the hammer right now -- the employers do."

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source: newsday.com