From the Associated Press, a tidbit that underscores the sobering reality of what’s been going on in the mortgage industry this year:

Since the start of the year, more than 38,000 workers have lost their jobs at mortgage lending institutions, according to recent company layoff announcements and data complied by global outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. Meanwhile, construction companies have announced nearly 20,000 job cuts this year, while the National Association of Realtors expects membership rolls to decline this year for the first time in a decade. It’s an employment collapse that threatens to rival the massive layoffs in the airline industry that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when some 100,000 employees lost their jobs. “It’s far from over,” said Bart Narter, a senior analyst with Celent, a Boston-based financial research and consulting firm. “The subprime lending collapse will continue to ripple through the financial sector.”

That number likely goes up if we widen the net to cover the mortgage industry outside of just individual lenders; it goes up even further if we talk about “housing in general.” It’s likely that we’ll see many more jobs lost in the next two quarters. Not a pleasant thought, by any means.