About Mark Ruhl

I started in this business in 2004, which means I've now originated loans through a housing bubble, a financial crisis, a decade of historically cheap money, a pandemic, and whatever you'd call the last three years.

I don't bring that up to brag about longevity, I bring it up because it's the reason I'm useful to you. Most of what makes a mortgage hard isn't the math, it's knowing which lender will actually look at a file that doesn't fit the standard shape, and knowing that up front instead of after you've spent three weeks finding out the hard way.

Why I'm a broker and not a bank

A bank or a credit union sells you its own products, and it has maybe four or five of them. They're usually good products, too, so I'm not knocking anybody here. But if your situation doesn't fit inside one of those four or five, the conversation simply ends, because there is nowhere else for that loan officer to go. So what's different on my side of the desk?

As a broker, I work with dozens of lenders instead of one, and none of them are mine. So when somebody comes to me after being turned down somewhere else, the problem is almost never the borrower, it's that the person they talked to was working from a short list and this borrower didn't happen to be on it. My list is a good deal longer than that, and I keep adding to it.

That's why the awkward loans are the ones I've become known for, things like ITIN, manufactured homes in a park, bank statement, bridge, construction, reverse and commercial. It isn't because any of that is glamorous. It's because nobody else wanted to sit down and figure them out.

How I actually work

I answer the phone. This one shows up in almost every review I've ever gotten, which probably tells you more about the industry standard than it does about me. But it's true, and it's the simplest promise I make: if you text me at 7pm on a Tuesday, you'll most likely hear back at 7pm on a Tuesday.

I'll tell you no. If I don't think I can help you, or if the deal you're being offered somewhere else is better than anything I can do, then I'm going to say so. I'd rather lose the one loan than spend three weeks pretending otherwise.

I explain the mechanism. I've written a market update every Friday since 2023 laying out why rates did what they did that week (treasury auctions, inflation prints, Fed language, whatever it happened to be). I don't do it because it generates business. I do it because people make better decisions when they understand what's actually moving underneath the number.

I close on time. The realtors who send me business do it because of this one, and they would stop sending it the moment I didn't.

Where I'm licensed

I'm personally licensed in Oregon, Washington, California, Arizona and Idaho. The most useful piece of that is Oregon plus Washington, because the Portland metro straddles the Columbia and most Portland loan officers can't originate on both sides of the river. So if you're weighing a house in Vancouver against one in Portland, I can quote you both.

You can verify all of this yourself at NMLS Consumer Access, just search my NMLS ID, 105591. And you should be doing that with any loan officer you talk to, including me.

What happens after you close

Most loan officers hand you the keys and disappear, and I've never understood the logic of that, because the people I've already worked with are the ones I know best. So I stay in touch. Past clients get a home value estimate from me every month, and I call them on their birthdays, which is roughly two thousand people at this point. My family finds that funny. I find it's the best part of the job.

That's also where most of my business comes from, which is worth saying out loud. I don't buy leads and I'm not handed a pipeline by a branch, so after twenty-two years almost everything on my desk arrives because a past client or a realtor sent it to me. That arrangement only works if the last loan went well, which is a pretty good incentive structure from where you're sitting.

Outside of work

I've lived in the Portland area my whole life apart from four years at the University of Washington, where I studied history and philosophy. My wife and I just hit twenty years married, we have three kids and two dogs, and most of what I do outside of work is running, swimming, cooking, or sitting around with friends and family.

I watch every Husky football game, I've been a Blazers fan through some rough stretches, and after all this time I still couldn't imagine living anywhere but the Pacific Northwest. If you're moving here from somewhere else and you want an honest opinion on a neighborhood, ask me. I'll have one.