National real estate giant cutting jobs

TAMPA — Online real estate giant Zillow is laying off 17 employees in Tampa as it shuts down its Zillow Offers program.

The layoffs affect employees working at the company’s downtown office on Ashley Drive according to a letter sent to the state and Tampa Mayor Jane Castor. The layoffs will begin Jan. 3 and last throughout the year.

The letter was sent to meet federally mandated Worker Adjustment Retraining and Notification (WARN) Act requirements.

The Seattle-based company announced in an earnings statement earlier this month that it was shutting down the service where it would buy homes and then resell them. Zillow Group’s co-founder and CEO Rich Barton says the decision was made because “we’ve determined the unpredictability in forecasting home prices far exceeds what we anticipated and continuing to scale Zillow Offers would result in too much earnings and balance-sheet volatility.”

Eliminating the program comes with a heavy cost, though. The company says it will lay off about 25% of its workforce as it winds down the service. On its website, Zillow says it employs about 8,000 people.

The company, in the letter, says that in Tampa 11 administrative workers will lose their jobs as will six renovation scope evaluators. It did not respond to questions about how many employees, if any, would remain in Tampa.

Zillow, in the earnings statement, reported that its third quarter revenue was $1.7 billion.