Great Western Gives Up on Its Home Resale Unit : Real estate: Closure will put up to 1,300 agents and support staff out of work. Those affected include 40 workers at the division’s Yorba Linda base.

Great Western Financial Corp. said Wednesday that it will shutter its real estate home resale unit by Jan. 31, throwing as many as 1,300 agents and support staff out of work and ending its seven-year effort to build a competitive real estate brokerage.

The closure will affect 40 employees at Great Western Real Estate’s administrative headquarters in Yorba Linda and 162 employees and 1,103 contract brokers at 25 field offices in Southern California and parts of Northern California.

The company is also closing six Summit Escrow offices in Southern California, including one in Orange County that employs 48 people.

Last month, the real estate subsidiary shut down its new-home sales department, laying off about 40 full-time employees and 160 part-time sales agents.

Great Western Financial’s largest subsidiary is Great Western Bank, the nation’s second-largest thrift. Ian Campbell, a Great Western Financial spokesman, said the decision to close the real estate brokerage unit is in keeping with the company’s efforts to focus on its core businesses: residential mortgage lending and retail banking.

“This is not another doom-and-gloom signal about the real estate market in California,” Campbell said. “The real estate business is soft, but this had more to do with Great Western’s internal plans than with problems in the market.”

He said, however, that the real estate unit has not been consistently profitable in the seven years that Great Western has owned it and is not profitable now.

Mark Coleman, partner in charge of the real estate practice at the Deloitte & Touche accounting firm in Newport Beach, said the closure “speaks to the obvious slowdown everyone in the industry is experiencing. It is just a sign of the times.”

There has been a spate of real estate and construction industry layoffs and business closings in the last six months, “and people are looking for ways to slim down, or are shutting down if they can’t slim down,” Coleman said.

Managers and brokers contacted at some Great Western Real Estate offices referred questions to the parent firm’s corporate offices in Beverly Hills.

One broker did say, however, that employees in her office had not been told much yet about the closure. “All I can say,” she said, “is, gee, Merry Christmas!”

Great Western spokesman Campbell said there are several possibilities for disposition of the real estate unit.

“Some individual offices or groups of offices might be sold to current agents or employees; we have negotiated such a deal with an office in Walnut Creek,” Campbell said.

He said some offices may be sold to another regional or national realty chain, but declined to identify any prospective buyers.

If no buyers are found by the Jan. 31 deadline, the office will be closed, he said.

Employees were told of the pending closure Wednesday morning, Campbell said. Full-time employees have been given a “fair” severance and benefits package and can apply for positions elsewhere within Great Western Financial, he said.

The company is providing job counseling to laid-off workers. Contract agents will be allowed to move to other brokerages and to take current listings with them even before the Jan. 31 deadline, Campbell said. Great Western will not claim a share of commissions on their sales.

The company will maintain a transition group after Jan. 31 to handle escrows in process and to make sure customers are not left in the lurch.

Closing the real estate unit will not affect the home mortgage lending operations of Great Western Bank and will have no impact on Great Western Financial’s earnings, Campbell said.

The real estate company was a small part of Great Western’s business. It had $50 million in gross sales commissions in 1989, contrasted with $3.8 billion in total revenue for Great Western Financial.