Mike Ruhland is a mortgage loan officer for LendSmart Mortgage, a company that helps people and businesses secure financing for homes and commercial properties.
Originally from Shoreview, Ruhland’s childhood was normal, the drama and intrigue quite unspectacular.
Not that Ruhland was complaining.
“Straight suburbia,” he explains, those two words enough to provide ample context regarding his upbringing.
As a teenager, Ruhland did telemarketing for a mortgage loan company, his job being to find prospective homebuyers who needed financing to purchase a property.
“I was making $15 an hour, plus a commission if the client did their mortgage with us, and back in 1999, that was a pretty good wage for a high schooler,” says Ruhland, who never went to college, but once he became a mortgage loan officer, it became readily apparent that higher education was unnecessary.
“I started making a six-figure income when I was eighteen years old. Never went to college. Didn’t need the debt,” he adds with a chuckle.
After achieving sustained success as a mortgage loan officer, eventually Ruhland and a business partner opted to start their own brokerage.
“Our office was in the basement of my first home,” Ruhland recalls.
“Extremely humble beginnings.”
Soon, the basement space became obsolete, and the firm moved to Stillwater.
Before long, forty other mortgage lenders were part of Ruhland’s team, but following a dispute with a potential partner, the long-term viability of the firm was compromised.
“That crippled us big time,” Ruhland acknowledges, but before irretractable chaos ensued, Ruhland’s firm was bought out.
Still enamored with putting together deals, the Shoreview native joined another brokerage, and he soon ascended to managing the company’s top branch.
“I was doing really well,” Ruhland says, but that company suffered from financial malfeasance from a higher-up, leading to Ruhland departing.
Fortunately, the talented consultant landed with LendSmart, and he’s since thrived.
“When I partnered with LendSmart, I kept growing and growing, and I’ve been with them ever since,” Ruhland says.
Throughout his two-plus decades in the mortgage loan business, Ruhland has experienced the tumult of sluggish economies, unpredictable interest rates, and massive spikes in home costs, all of which have taught him countless lessons.
Yet, perhaps more surprisingly, Ruhland harkens back to his high school days when asked to cite a major reason for his sustained prosperity.
More specifically, that company he started with ran him through an intensive two-week training that aptly prepared him for the rigors of client acquisition.
“Because of that training, I didn’t have any fear on the phone,” Ruhland mentions.
“And I quickly learned that with mortgage loans, it was a numbers game, and for whatever reason I was always able to excel with that.”
Beyond dialing and prospecting, Ruhland discovered crafty ways to generate business, like cross-referencing public information to find homeowners whose interest rates could be significantly slashed through refinancing.
He also scoured bankruptcy listings for other people he could potentially put in positions to avoid eviction.
“I earned tons of deals with those strategies,” says Ruhland, whose commitment to patience and persistence ultimately was effective.
“I don’t want to oversimplify things, but over time I built a book of business, and I became a trusted resource for securing loans, and things just naturally evolved in a positive manner.”
These days, in addition to helping broker mortgage loans, Ruhland is investing heavily into real estate.
At present, he has fourteen properties, each acquired with a specific end game in mind.
“The goal is to create quiet mailbox-money, to the point where, because I have set up a solid foundation of property managers and payment systems, income simply trickles in every month,” Ruhland explains.
“Plus, the properties are continuing to appreciate, and I can depreciate them on my taxes, so ideally, I’m going to try to acquire as many properties as I can.”
More recently, Ruhland has also made inroads with BNI, a networking group where members, who are all local business owners, pass business among themselves.
“Getting into that organization was no small task though,” Ruhland emphasizes, citing BNI’s rigorous application process where he competed with 36 other applicants for the group’s sole mortgage loan officer spot.
While Ruhland concedes that good fortune contributed to his eventual acceptance into BNI, he is also quick to mention that for weeks he made a concerted effort to bring value to the current members in order to ingratiate himself.
“I saw the needs the group had and I tried to fill them,” he says.
“As a visitor, I was leveraging my network to fill other vacant positions in their organization, and I think that was a pretty good indicator that I could contribute to the group.”
By now, it’s evident that Ruhland is a man of action, an individual who would rather take a misstep than sit idle and wait for good fortune to arrive.
It’s that same mentality he encourages his clients to adopt, particularly these days in an uber-competitive real estate market where hopeful buyers can ill afford to be complacent.
“Don’t wait. Buy now,” Ruhland suggests, provided any deal in 2024 makes financial sense for one’s unique set of circumstances.
“It’s cliche by now, but with home buying, you marry the home and date the rate. Yes, rates will likely come down, but then the affordability of homes will be less because more buyers will want to join the market. In that sense, if there is a home you want now, and it’s in your budget, pull the trigger because you just don’t know when that opportunity will arise again.” QS
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