“Don’t you watch the news?”

Kenny Pleasant is a real estate broker, investor and author based in Greater Seattle. He is the founder and managing broker of NextHome Prolific, the brokerage he opened in 2021, and the author of No Money No Problem: How to Build a Real Estate Empire When You Have Nothing to Start With. He has been licensed since 2009 and specializes in investment real estate, working primarily with builders, developers and investors across King County.

That question in the headline is what his uncle asked him, laughing, when he said he was going into real estate. It was 2008. His pastor asked him when he was going to stop playing around and go back to work.

Five years later, almost to the day

Kenny became an ironworker when his wife got pregnant with their first child. He told himself he would do it for five years. He was laid off almost exactly five years later, in the middle of the 2008 crash, with three toddlers at home and a house he had just bought.

He was watching Million Dollar Listing Los Angeles when he decided he could do that instead. Everyone he told thought he had lost it. Thousands of agents were leaving the industry that year. He walked in.

The drive from Tacoma

He was living south of Seattle, because that is where the bubble had left something he could afford. He signed with a brokerage in Bellevue instead, fifty miles and over an hour each way, because Bellevue was the most expensive city in the state and that was where the million dollar homes were. The other agents in the office had a running joke about it. He drives all the way from Tacoma.

He made that drive seven days a week, twelve to fifteen hours a day, for nine months.

Nine weekends in the same empty house

His first deal came from sitting the open house at a $1.1 million new construction listing as the site agent. He held it open Friday, Saturday and Sunday, noon to four, for nine consecutive weeks. On the ninth, a man walked in, said he wanted to write it up himself, and paid cash out of stock he had cashed from his years at Myspace. It closed in seven days. Kenny's first commission check was $33,000.

Then nothing. One house sold in three months, and after it, nine months without another closing. He chased for-sale-by-owners and expired listings and landed eight expireds. Not one of them sold. It was the hardest financial stretch of his adult life. He went back to a union ironworking job and quit after three days.

Two hours a day of audiobooks

What broke the drought was the commute. He started filling those two hours a day with audiobooks, then could not stop, and read and listened through more than three hundred titles over the next five years. How to Win Friends and Influence People. Think and Grow Rich. Psycho-Cybernetics. The 48 Laws of Power. The Compound Effect. Purple Cow.

One line out of all of it changed the business immediately: if you want to be successful, do the opposite of everyone else. He has run on it since. He still reads two to three books a month, implements at least one idea from every book and every podcast, and when he wants to learn something he reads two or three books on it, finds an expert to follow, and takes a course.

Learning from the people who had done it

Kenny went through Craig Proctor's Platinum Program in 2012 and 2013. He also studied under Darren Hardy, first in an invitation-only program Hardy ran for just two cohorts of twenty hand-picked entrepreneurs, and then through Hardy's two-day Business Masterclass, which he attended three times.

What the record looks like

Kenny has ranked among the top agents in his market since his second year, has broken multiple sales records, and has earned top producer awards every year he has been licensed. He holds luxury and new construction designations, and has consistently been one of the very few agents in his market securing listings in the $3 million to $4 million range.

He started wholesaling and flipping in 2013 and bought his first buy-and-hold rental in 2018. He now carries a portfolio built on off-market and development deals across King County, plus rentals in Ohio.

He eventually moved to Bellevue and bought a home there, in the market everyone had told him he had no business driving to. His proudest moment is smaller and better than any of it: as a high school dropout, he hired a Harvard graduate.

Building the brokerage

NextHome Prolific opened in 2021, serving Washington State. Kenny built it as a place agents build ownership rather than rent a desk. Compensation is structured around where an agent actually is, from splits to a monthly fee to full commission for experienced producers. Behind that sits the part most brokerages talk about and few deliver: Agent Launch for new agents, a branding program, a social content system, paid-ads and prospecting lead generation, an AI accelerator putting current tools in agents' hands, and a member services team of actual people.

The proof he points to is one agent who had averaged about $80,000 a year over two years in the business. After joining and running his investor agent system, she made $100,000 in her first three months.

Writing it down

No Money No Problem is Kenny's debut book. It is a practical guide to acquiring real estate without conventional financing, a strong credit profile, or cash sitting in savings, written for the people the industry was not designed for. It came out on 1 July 2026, runs 404 pages, and is published under 4th and Long Publishing.

Teaching it

Agent Revolution is his coaching program for agents, opening 1 October 2026, and unlike the brokerage it works nationwide. It is aimed at agents grinding without a system, at part-timers, and at people building without a personal network to lean on. It teaches structure rather than motivation: how to build a business that generates income without requiring your constant presence, and how to convert that income into assets.

Roughly seven in eight new agents leave the business within five years. Kenny's view is that the number is not about talent. It is about mentorship, systems and lead generation, in that order, and none of the three are secret.

Outside the work

Kenny is a father of four. He travels toward places and cultures he has not seen yet, is unreasonably fond of lazy rivers, will defend a spa day to anyone who asks, and cold plunges on purpose. There are always two or three books going.

Speaking and press

Kenny is available for podcasts, panels and interviews on getting into real estate without capital or connections, brokerage economics, agent development and retention, and the Greater Seattle market. Enquiries to [email protected].