EverBank to Lay Off 300 in Jacksonville

EverBank (EVER) in Jacksonville, Fla., is laying off 302 employees, or about 7% of its workforce, as it quits the business of servicing defaulted home loans.

EverBank will lay off around 200 workers from its mortgage-servicing business and 100 from its home-loan origination group, company spokesman Michael Cosgrove said. All of the cuts will be in Jacksonville, and they will begin in late February.

The layoffs are partly the result of EverBank's October sale of its default servicing platform, as well as about $20 billion of mortgage-servicing rights, to Green Tree Servicing, a subsidiary of Walter Investment Management (WMC), Cosgrove said. GreenTree agreed to hire 500 EverBank default-servicing employees as part of the deal, which is expected to close in the first quarter.

EverBank plans to lay off the remaining workers in the default-servicing business, as well as certain other servicing employees. EverBank will continue servicing high-quality performing loans, Cosgrove said.

EverBank is eliminating the 100 positions in its home-lending position due to the nationwide slowdown in refinancing, as well as an expected reduction in refinancing resulting from the sale of the default-servicing division.

The $17.6 billion-asset EverBank currently has 4,096 employees nationwide, including 2,599 in Jacksonville, Cosgrove said.

The layoffs were first reported Wednesday in the Jacksonville Business Journal.