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Tricia Powe lost her job and her house in Corona and then found new employment -- all because of the bashed housing market.

Having been laid off as a mortgage consultant in March, Powe, 44, and her husband no longer could afford to pay their own mortgage. Their house was foreclosed on and they started the new year packing up the family's belongings so they and their two children could move to a rental in Riverside.

Powe is part of a battalion of white-collar workers displaced from their jobs in Inland Southern California's fast-shrinking housing industry and learning to change their lifestyles and reinvent their careers. The irony for Powe is her new job is as a foreclosure-prevention counselor for a consumer assistance group in Riverside.
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William Wilson Lewis III/The Press-Enterprise
Tricia Powe’s Corona home was foreclosed on after she lost her job as a loan consultant. Rather than get back in the mortgage industry, she got a job as a foreclosure-prevention counselor. Powe made sure to leave a note for the new owner on the garage: "History of Mold."

The pain of job loss goes beyond those who wield hammers and pour concrete on construction sites. Also hitting the streets are high-paid home building executives and hundreds of engineers, architects, appraisers, underwriters, escrow workers, loan processors and real estate brokers and agents.

Only a few years ago, home builders and related professionals flocked from the coast to open satellite offices in Riverside and San Bernardino counties to serve the region's burgeoning construction sites. Now they are laying off workers at all levels and closing or consolidating those offices.

The impact is trembling across the region. William Lyon and Richmond American closed their Inland divisional offices in Riverside and Corona.

KB Home, which just this week reported a $773 million loss in its fourth quarter, last year closed a division that covered San Bernardino County; it now oversees home building in Riverside, San Bernardino, Orange, San Diego and Imperial counties from a single building in Wildomar. Frontier Homes is closing its offices in Ontario and consolidating in Hesperia. Lennar closed its Palm Springs office.

With consolidation comes layoffs. "I cannot think of any company that has not let go a portion of their workforce over the past 18 months and are not thinking of laying off more," said Borre Winkle, executive director of the Riverside chapter of the Building Industry Association.

'Getting Worse Every Day'

"I would say the industry is 60 percent smaller than it was two years ago," said Steve Johnson, director with MetroStudy, a Riverside real estate consulting firm.

The cuts started in 2006 and have accelerated as the predicted "soft landing" for home builders failed to materialize. "It is getting worse every day," Johnson said.

Greg Berkemer, executive vice president of the California Desert Association of Realtors, said he expects that organization will lose 30 percent of its membership from non-renewals in the next two years. He predicted many of the agents "will go back to something they did before they sold real estate."

Executive search firms say that although builders of apartments, offices, hotels and retail complexes are recruiting, they usually aren't willing to hire someone whose experience is limited to single-family home development.

"I think the biggest problem we have now is that the market is absolutely inundated with people who have residential experience," said John Rainone, a project operations manager with MorganSullivan, an executive search firm that specializes in the real estate and construction industries.

Some, such as Gary Chronister, 54, who was laid off as a division manager for Meritage Homes in the Coachella Valley on April Fools Day 2006, have set up consulting businesses to help home builders and financial institutions salvage money-losing housing projects.

"We solve the problems and they don't have to bring us on staff," Chronister said.

Scott Laurie, formerly president of KB Home's Inland division, quit before his division was eliminated to become president and chief operating officer of Olson Homes. He said trends favor the attached urban housing that his new employer builds on the coast.

"The opportunity was not going to be in the Inland Empire in the next few years," Laurie said, explaining his decision to jump ship.

Can't Earn a Living

Mortgage bankers and real estate agent also are feeling the pinch. Brian Weide, vice president and branch manager of SunStar Mortgage Services in Ontario, said many loan officers paid on commission have not formally quit but no longer show up for work.

"Most of them are leaving because they can no longer make a living in the business," he said.

John Munoz, a loan officer at SunStar, has seen his business dwindle by more than half.

"I got my insurance license so I could start doing financial planning seminars," Munoz said. The Upland resident, with a college degree in finance and more than 20 years in the mortgage industry, is also selling jewelry over the Internet and has learned to repair eyeglass frames for optometrists.

Despite all these endeavors, which he said keep him busy at least 12 hours a day, Munoz said he and his wife, a teacher, have seen their monthly income drop from about $12,000 to $5,000. They cancelled a European vacation and a full-time maid, and cut back on dining out.

Scott Chappell, a longtime Riverside real estate broker, said that since 2004 his business has shrunk by two-thirds. Chappell said he is trying to bolster his earnings through property management and hoped to land much-coveted contracts with lenders to sell foreclosure properties. But to get by, he said, he is selling real estate he bought during the flush times.

"I work every day and make absolutely no money. It is just a living hell this year," Chappell said last month. "I have been through three real estate down cycles and this one is absolutely the worst."

Robert Kleinhenz, deputy chief economist for the California Association of Realtors, said half of the association's 200,000 members statewide became agents in the last five years and have never weathered a down cycle before.

Job losses in defense, including military base closures, triggered Southern California's last real estate downturn in the 1990s. Then many Southern California home builders expanded to places with stronger economies, especially Arizona and Nevada.

MetroStudy's Johnson said the growth of national public builders over the last decade was expected to protect the industry against localized economic downturns. But the strategy isn't working, he said, because the current malaise is nationwide, giving home builders few geographic alternatives -- at least not in the U.S.

Architectural and engineering firms that catered to Inland home builders are opening offices overseas to take advantage of housing booms in China, North Africa and the Middle East.

Masoud Bokaie, chief executive of Borm, a home building engineering firm in Irvine, said several months ago Borm opened an office in Dubai to compete for business in the Middle East and North Africa.

"Their economies are growing and their lower middle class is growing and they are looking for Western-style housing," Bokaie said.

Creativity is the means of survival, he said. "Every time you are against the wall you can say OK, this is the end. It is not the end. You always have to look for angles," he said.

Finding New Employment

The Inland Empire chapter of Experience Unlimited, the state Employment Development Department program for professional job seekers, urges those who lose jobs in home building, mortgage lending and real estate sales to market their skills to other industries.

Debora Napier, who heads the EDD program in Corona, suggested that someone with experience selling houses might apply for jobs selling other big-ticket merchandise such as cars or pharmaceuticals, depending on their level of education.

Napier cautions that some formerly high-earning real estate professionals changing careers may need to take a pay cut or settle temporarily for something less than a dream job.

Powe said in March when she lost a $3,000-a-month job as a mortgage consultant, her first impulse was to jump back into the mortgage business. But she said the industry continued to deteriorate, and when she realized she would be unable to earn a living as a sales agent, she took a job as a foreclosure-prevention counselor for Springboard, a Riverside nonprofit credit counseling agency.

In her new position, Powe said she is earning close to her former salary and has an opportunity to share what she has learned.

"I finally feel like I have a purpose," Powe said. "I have a job again and the knowledge to help other people through what I have been through."

Reach Leslie Berkman at 951-893-211 or lberkman@PE.com