Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Layoffs and office closures

News today on office closures and layoffs due to the local real estate slowdown. This blogger has received word that LandAmerica Commonwealth will be closing their three Kern County offices on Friday.

Also, from the Bakersfield Californian comes a story on layoffs at the newspaper due to a slowdown in real estate ad sales:

A steep but cyclical decline in real estate advertising has forced The Bakersfield Californian to eliminate 40 positions, 10 of them through layoffs, company President and CEO Richard Beene announced Tuesday.

Publisher Ginger Moorhouse lamented the loss of the 40 positions, or 12.5 percent of her staff, saying, "It is really hard to make decisions like these, but I am confident The Bakersfield Californian will have a great future in our market."

Between 2004 and 2006, The Californian enjoyed strong profits largely because of an "exploding real estate market," Beene said. But recently, real estate agents, home builders and others in the industry have scaled back their advertising, he said. The real estate market is not expected to rebound until 2009 at the earliest, he said.

2 comments:

Rob Dawg said...

But, but, but newspaper operations are independent of the advertising arm. How many times were we told that?

xs10shell said...

Crisp gets even.