A Florida firm that acquired a loan-servicing company with an office in Raleigh said Wednesday that it plans to close the facility and eliminate 242 jobs.
Ocwen Financial Services filed a notice with the state under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act -- something required by federal law any time a company is planning to shut down a facility or lay off a large number of workers.
The notice states that Ocwen, which completed its $1.3 billion acquisition of HomEq Servicing on Wednesday, will permanently close the HomEq office at 701 Corporate Center Drive by Oct. 31.
The announcement is a blow to the Triangle economy, which has struggled to add jobs although it has one of the healthiest employment markets in the state. The region's unemployment rate stood at 7.5 percent in July.
HomEq services troubled loans for lenders and investors, taking calls from struggling homeowners and working with borrowers to modify their loans or lower interest rates on their mortgages.
The company has 1,143 employees, the majority of whom work out of HomEq's main offices in North Highlands, a suburb of Sacramento, Calif.
Those employees will be let go by Nov.19, according to a WARN notice filed in California.
Ocwen purchased HomEq from London-based Barclays Bank. It was the fourth time HomEq had been sold in the past decade.
HomEq was once known as the Money Store. First Union bank turned that loan-servicing business into HomEq in 2000.
It became part of Wachovia in 2001 when Wachovia merged with First Union.
Wachovia sold HomEq to Barclays for $469 million in 2006.
Ocwen said in its filing with the state that the work now done at the Raleigh office will be transferred to other Ocwen facilities.
Ocwen, based in West Palm Beach, is one of the country's largest subprime loan-servicing companies. It has offices in California, Florida and Georgia and Washington, D.C.; it also operates in India and Uruguay.
Of Ocwen's 1,582 employees, 234 work in the United States, according to the company's financial filings.
Ocwen officials declined to comment beyond a statement released by the company.
"We regret the loss of HomEq jobs and are grateful to those employees for their service and commitment to that firm, but we are heartened that the addition of HomEq customers to the Ocwen platform will enable us to provide real, home-saving solutions to more distressed homeowners and step up our role in efforts to solve the mortgage crisis," Ocwen's president, Ronald Faris, said in the statement.
Sacramento Bee staff writer Jim Wasserman contributed to this report.
