With the coronavirus continuing to spread, some of the biggest companies in the U.S. are moving their employees to remote work to mitigate the impact of the virus.
In the last two weeks, Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple and countless other companies have enacted work-from-home policies.
Included among those is the biggest mortgage lender in the country. Quicken Loans this week shifted nearly all of its 18,000 employees to work from home.
Quicken Loans President and Chief Operating Officer Bob Walters told HousingWire that approximately 90% of the company’s 18,000 employees have shifted to working from home, including Walters himself.
According to Walters, those remote employees will continue to work from home for at least the next several weeks. Walters said that the Quicken Loans work-from-home policy is set to run through April 6, 2020, but could be extended depending on further developments.
According to Walters, many of the company’s employees have been able to work from home for years, making a shift like this an easier transition than it would have been otherwise.
“We’re a digital lender, so we don’t need to be physically passing documents back and forth,” Walters said. “We’ve been comfortable communicating in a lot of different ways, including video meetings, chats, and shared documents. We’ve been preparing for a large-scale event like this for a long time.”
Despite the preparation, Walters said the shift to working from home would not have been as successful without the full support of the employees themselves. “I’m really proud of our team,” Walters said.
The change to remote work is happening in conjunction with a boom in business for Quicken Loans. “What’s been great is that despite everything, we’re still having the biggest application and closing days in company history. Our closing times have actually been dropping. These volumes are huge. We’re seeing double what there was just a month ago,” said Walters.
There are numerous factors that could derail the mortgage market in the coming months, but the current industry-wide thinking is that 2020 is going to be a near-record-breaking year. “As you can imagine, we had lofty goals for the year and we’re going to exceed them,” Walter said.
And for the time being, the company’s employees will be doing that from home.
