Gliding Along A New Path After Job Loss

Geoff Karlavage's plane had just touched down in Las Vegas in August 2007 when he learned that the mortgage lender he worked for was shutting down.

"I read it in an e-mail message on my BlackBerry and was just stunned," he said.

After drowning his sorrows Vegas-style, Karlavage returned to Tampa and worked hard to find a job.

"At every job fair I went to, you could tell the employers were thinking, 'Not another mortgage guy,'" he said. "There were so many people in the mortgage industry who were laid off, and we were all applying for the same jobs."

A Magic Carpet Ride

About six months ago, Karlavage decided to change gears. He bought five motorized Segway scooters for $5,500 each and opened a kiosk in the Channelside Bay Plaza complex, where he runs his company, Magic Carpet Glide Tampa Bay Segway Tours. From there, he leads guided tours of the city.

"I started this just to get some money in the door," he said. "But it's been very successful so far. I've been booked up."

Karlavage is one of thousands who have lost mortgage-related jobs in Florida. During the housing boom, thousands of workers flocked to profitable mortgage jobs.

As the housing market crumbled, so did many of the financial institutions that employed mortgage brokers and loan originators. Last year, Florida ranked second in the nation in the number of mortgage-related layoffs, according to employment data tracked by MortgageDaily.com. The Sunshine State lost 2,651 jobs in 2008, second to California.

When Karlavage returned from Las Vegas, he said he held a party for former co-workers to get together and bounce ideas off of one another. Everyone was desperate to find employment, he said.

Few of the co-workers had success right away, he said, and now they are scattered among several professions. Many are unemployed.

David Kraus is a former co-worker. He sold satellite TV for about six months, making less than half what he made in the mortgage business. When he wasn't working, he was sending out resumes.

"I just didn't hear back from most of them," Kraus said. "I applied for about 75 jobs. It wasn't that I had bad interviews; I wasn't even getting interviews."

So Kraus did something drastic, too. He took a part-time, unpaid internship at Raymond James Financial and went back to school. By day, he's working as a marketing assistant for a financial planner. By night, he's working toward a master's in business administration at the University of South Florida.

"I may have been able to go into some other field, but I didn't want to start at the bottom," he said. "I thought an MBA would help me get in at a medium level somewhere."

One thing helping Kraus, he said, is that he saved when times were good. While some co-workers were buying "Bucs tickets, fancy cars and expensive homes," he was socking money away.

He Wants To Be Own Boss

Karlavage said he came up with the Segway idea while sitting poolside at his Harbour Island condominium.

"Since no one was going to give me a job," he said, "I had to come up with a job of my own. I thought of the Segways because that's something no one else was doing in this area."

He said he found someone in Tampa with a deep knowledge of Tampa history. He took them out to lunch and learned as much as he could. For $50 a person, Karlavage leads the Segway tours and points out interesting facts and places across town.

He rides around Channelside and the port of Tampa, the convention center and Harbour Island. He has no employees and little overhead.

"To tell you the truth, people don't really seem to care what I talk about," he said. "They just want to ride the Segways and take in the views."

Karlavage said he doesn't know what the future will bring. For now, he'll keep driving the Segways. He said he knows one thing: He won't be going back into the mortgage business.

"I don't ever want a company to close down on me like that again," he said. "I don't want to have a boss again. I'm not sure what I'll do next, but I'll be doing some sort of business on my own."