Meet Board Member Robin Kendall
Meet Your Board: Robin Kendall, Membership Co-Chair
by Linden Gross, Incubation Press: Empowering – and Publishing – the Writer in All of Us
“I love what I do!” exclaims Robin Kendall, a senior loan officer and certified mortgage planner with Columbia River Bank who’s known as the M&M Lender around town because of her trademark M&Ms and associated slogan Money for Mortgages. “It’s a perfect fit for me because it’s a perfect blending of my background.”
Robin’s route to mortgage planning proved to be as circuitous as it has been sweeping. After just two years in college at the University of Oregon, Robin left school to take a job with a manufacturing and direct sales company in Houston. The owner couldn’t afford to pay her, but she offered to put Robin up in her home and give her stock options. The company, which sold home accent products using a Mary Kay Cosmetics approach, took off and at the age of 19, Robin became its president. She ran it for four years, opting to move on only when the owner decided to try and take the company to the next level.
Next, Robin got involved in the financial services industry, working for The Equitable as a registered representative selling everything from stocks to insurance and handling estate planning. “That all plays into what I do now,” she says. “When you talk to me about mortgages, you also get a financial planner even though I don’t have the certification.”
She burned out after about five years. “That’s when I got a wild hair and bought a restaurant in Central Oregon,” she recalls. That’s also when Robin discovered her passion for cooking, which an intensive month at a culinary school in San Jose took to a new level. For the next four years, she worked as head chef and owner of the Alpine Restaurant and Country Store at Suttle Lake during the eight months a year it was open. Winters were spent in Portland. When she and her partner couldn’t find a dog-friendly rental, Robin decided to buy a place instead, thereby launching herself into real estate investing.
By the time she sold the restaurant and moved to Portland in the mid 1990s, she had purchased two dozen turn-of-the-century units. “So there was always something to do,” she says. Though her work as a property manager ranged from repairs to full rehabs and more, she realized while trekking across the Andes in Patagonia with her mom that she wanted to go back to school. She enrolled at Portland State University, and by her mid-30s had earned a B.S. in biology. Her vision of attending vet school, however, crumbled when she was wait-listed. “I didn’t want to wait at that age,” she says. So she charged back into the financial arena as a private portfolio manager until 2001, when she added a real estate license to her list of credentials, moved to Bend and decided to become a mortgage planner.
“I’ve bought and/or sold 25 properties, but in 1992 I couldn’t get a loan even though I had 20 percent to put down because I was self-employed,” says Robin, who with her partner Leah are parents to 15-year-old son Talon (a skier and cellist), two dogs (Tug, a lab, and Bode, a border collie) and two cats (Juliette, a Linx-point Siamese, and Puffalumpagus or Puffy for short, a “mutt with an eating disorder”). “It’s really gratifying to be able to help people buy their first home or their vacation home, or restructure their mortgage to finance their kids’ education. People hate the notion of a mortgage, but it’s an incredibly powerful financial tool.”
