Zillow has laid off about 300 employees as it is shifting focus toward technology-related positions in the company, TechCrunch has learned from sources and confirmed with the company over e-mail.
The Seattle-headquartered online real estate marketplace informed its impacted employees about the decision on Tuesday. Shortly after receiving the communication, the impacted employees had to leave the company. The layoffs impacted Zillow Offer advisors, PA sales and back-end staff at Zillow Home Loans and Zillow Closing Services, as well as other teams.
“As part of our normal business process, we continuously evaluate and responsibly manage our resources as we create digital solutions to make it easier for people to move. This week, we have made the difficult — but necessary — decision to eliminate a small number of roles and will shift those resources to key growth areas around our housing super-app. We’re still hiring in key technology-related roles across the company,” a Zillow spokesperson said in a statement emailed to TechCrunch.
The company did not reveal the percentage of its workforce affected by the decision. However, in its last quarterly report filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in August, Zillow reported that it had 5,791 full-time employees in its workforce. Using that figure, this layoff has impacted around 5% of employees.
In November last year, Zillow announced that it would lay off a quarter of its staff — around 2,000 people — due to shutting down its home-buying service Offers that aimed to provide sellers with instant home offers. The company, at the time, had 8,000 employees.
Zillow has become one of the latest tech companies to lay off employees during this economic slowdown. Earlier this week, telehealth unicorn Cerebral reduced its workforce by 20% due to an ongoing push for efficiency. Companies including Netflix, Momentive Global, Spotify and Tencent have also made similar decisions recently. Similarly, Indian startups including Byju’s and Ola have let hundreds of employees go amid the downfall of funding and investments.
Source @TechCrunch
