Acquisition Nets Layoffs

About 170 employees of Saxon Capital Inc. will be laid off due to the merger, Morgan Stanley spokesman Mark Lake told MortgageDaily.com in an interview. Between 75 to 100 of those jobs are in Richmond, Va.

“We are reorganizing Saxon’s business — and focusing on its wholesale production and servicing operations — in order to best position the company for future growth as part of Morgan Stanley’s residential mortgage franchise,” Morgan Stanley said in an e-mail statement.

Reorganization will involve essentially shuttering retail operations and streamlining and consolidating servicing operations in Fort Worth, Texas, Lake said. Also, “because we’re a large operation, there’s going to be redundancy in corporate support functions, so there’ll be reductions there” as part of the approximately 170 job cuts.

“This will be it as far as layoffs go,” Lake added. Morgan Stanley’s plan to “significantly” grow Saxon’s business over the next few years will result in “hundreds of new jobs in the future.”

As of Dec. 31, 2005, Saxon had 1127 employees on board, according to the spokesman.

Morgan Stanley announced the completion of the merger deal on Monday, citing that the transaction “is another important step in our long-term strategy of building a global, vertically integrated residential mortgage business.”