Homes.com Feature
Thank you so much to Homes.com for reaching out and asking to feature Common Ground Referrals in a recent article. You can read the article on their platform by clicking the link below - a copy & paste is also provided here:
https://www.homes.com/news/agent-thought-doctors-would-be-her-niche-but-its-seattles-lgbtq-community
Agent thought doctors would be her niche, but it's Seattle’s LGBTQ+ community
With Common Ground launch, Jeanie Kendall wants to help clients find queer-friendly agents
August 26, 2026
Key takeaways
Seattle broker Jeanie Kendall found success in real estate by serving LGBTQ+ homebuyers, eventually building a business fueled almost entirely by referrals.
Her new Common Ground network aims to connect LGBTQ+ consumers with trusted real estate agents, especially in markets where inclusive professionals are hard to find.
Kendall says helping clients navigate identity-related challenges during real estate transactions can reduce stress and create a more welcoming homebuying experience.
When Jeanie Kendall decided to transition to a career in real estate, she assumed she had an easy niche: the medical professionals in greater Seattle.
She was coming out of a nearly 15-year career in medical administration, which included well-developed relationships and friendships with doctors, nurses, recruiters, and other healthcare professionals around Puget Sound. She was so sure these people would readily become her clients that she even structured her business around offerings that might appeal to medical professionals, such as physician loans.
“Literally, none of that happened,” she said. “What I learned is that when you are someone's agent and you do a good job, it doesn't matter if your friend becomes an agent. If you're going to want to sell your house, you're probably going to go to the person you worked with if you had a good relationship with them.”
Left with no clear path forward, Kendall worked on getting her name out generally, hosting informal homebuying classes and question-and-answer sessions in places where she felt comfortable.
“I would hold them in very established queer-owned queer spaces in Seattle,” Kendall said. “All of a sudden, I was getting business, and it was in [a queer] community after I had been closeted in my previous career.”
After more than a decade of not broadcasting her own queer identity in the workplace, the shift was a bit of a shock to the system. Kendall leaned into the demand, and her business grew in kind. After about two years, around 2021, she was a top producer in her Keller Williams Greater Seattle office and operating at a 100% referral rate, with nearly all of her clients identifying as members of the area's queer community.
“I even had my neighbor at one point ask me, and she was like, ‘Do you work with straight people?’” Kendall recalled with a chuckle. “I was like, ‘Yes, I work with everyone.’”
A Florida foreclosure taught Kendall about operating with caution
Kendall’s interest in the industry came from one very bad experience in ownership (her Florida home going into foreclosure) and one very good experience (purchasing a home in Seattle).
In Florida, she explained, she’d owned a home but had to relocate out of state just as the 2008-era housing crisis began. Finding herself unable to sell or rent the property, Kendall had to resort to foreclosure, she said, even though it pained her. Owning a home in Washington, by contrast, was a much easier experience, although Kendall was operating from a new base of knowledge.
“I just felt like I could see [the homeownership process] from a perspective that a lot of folks didn't have,” Kendall said. “I was a little more of a conservative-slash-cautious real estate agent.”
Kendall also liked streamlining the homebuying process for people, which generally came with equal measures of excitement and intense stress. It was the same kind of relationship-building she’d appreciated in her administrative work, where she helped patients navigate healthcare decisions.
While working with and as a member of Seattle’s queer community, Kendall learned to smooth over the discrepancies between a person’s preferred name, pronouns and identity and those on their legal documents, which could cause some pain for her transgender and nonbinary clients.
“They were able to have an initial conversation with me in a safe space. Whether they were uncomfortable or not, they knew that they could have it with me and I made them feel comfortable,” Kendall said. “And then I had the conversation with everyone else, so they didn't have to ever have that conversation again.”
That meant, for example, contacting a lender, title company or attorney involved in the buying process ahead of time to alert them if a client’s name differed from that on their legal documents. Taking that conversation off a client’s plate meant one less stress to navigate, Kendall said, one less thing to worry about amid an already stressful process.
After a while, Kendall realized that if there were a need for this kind of community-focused work in Seattle, there would probably be a need in other parts of the country. So, the broker launched Common Ground, a referral network aimed at helping members of the queer community find real estate professionals in any market.
The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
How specifically do you see Common Ground supporting clients?
I'm hoping to be one of the top websites that pops up when somebody types in, ‘How do I find a queer-friendly agent in wherever they’re looking?’ or something like that.
There are places in the country where it's not hard at all to find a queer agent, but the more I talk to folks, the more I realize there are agents who are in the community who absolutely do not advertise themselves as queer because they don't want to lose business. So, it's more difficult to find an agent in some parts of the United States than others.
I like to use the term "values-aligned" because I will help anyone who wants help finding the right agent for them. I'm definitely open to helping anybody at all.
What would you emphasize to other brokers looking to ensure queer clients have a comfortable experience?
Act as the one person that the client has to come out to.
And then from there, having that conversation with everybody else involved in the transaction, so that they don't ever have to find themselves in an uncomfortable position or responding to a name they don't align with.
I think that's probably the biggest piece, but it's a piece that people don't think of. It's just something that I learned through talking to my clients. If you're not working in a community and talking to folks about what they want regularly, then you just wouldn't know to do that.
It's not that other agents overlook it. It's just that they haven't had the experience to know to do it.
Why are you launching Common Ground now?
I would say I’ve helped at least half a dozen families who had transgender children relocate from the middle of the country to Seattle, specifically to make sure that their kids had a safe place to grow up.
To those of us in the community, it's not surprising at all. We're talking about it. Agents in the community are talking about it all the time. We're watching people move around, trying to find safe spaces for their kids.
But the reality is a lot of people don't have the money to move to the places where their kids or they themselves can be safe or safer. So that's why I think that, right now more than ever, this service is important. At least you can find somebody in the place that you're living who can help you with those transactions, who's going to be respectful, safe and help you make a move that makes sense for you.
While you’re still licensed in Washington, you and your wife recently relocated to Eureka Springs, Arkansas, and bought a home. What’s your new home like?
Our house in Seattle was a split-level, and we bought it specifically because it allowed my mother to move in with us. She lived downstairs, so we both had autonomy, but we were close to each other, so we could help. That experience made me really well-versed in helping folks in Seattle who were looking for multigenerational houses, too.
My mom passed away about two and a half years ago, and we stayed in that house, but 3,000 square feet was just too much, and it was sad because my mom wasn't downstairs anymore.
So, the house we fell in love with here is a two-bedroom, two-bathroom, 1,000-square-foot home, so we really downsized. We are remodeling the downstairs, which was unfinished, so we kind of had a blank slate to do what we want.
It's on a street with five other houses. It's a dead-end, so we only ever see our neighbors’ cars drive up and down the street. We have deer in our yard every day. We have a groundhog in our yard, too. We have everything.
Does the groundhog have a name?
It does. Beefcake.
In your years as an agent, what is the weirdest thing that happened to you on the job?
I remember helping some friends buy a house in the South Seattle area, and we were doing our inspection. It was an older house, but it had a really large walk-in closet that had one of those little finger-hook hatch doors on the floor.
We opened that, and there was a chair and a weird collection of creepy things. I was like, ‘I think they are going to not want this,’ but they loved it. They're like super into it.
I’ll also tell you the weirdest thing I ever wrote into a contract. I had a client who bought a townhome in Lynnwood, and it was during the winter. We went for our final walkthrough, and a possum had tried to get through a hole in the fence and got stuck and froze to death. So, I had to write a 35R that said, “Seller will remove the frozen possum from the fence prior to closing.”
And they did.
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