Built because I couldn't find a tradesperson when I needed one.

A couple of years ago, my friend Ryan Dallas — founder of Ryan Dallas Real Estate in Champaign — was staying at my house on vacation with his family. We had about ten people in the house. The fridge broke.

I started calling every tradesperson I could find on Google. Nobody could come right away. Some wanted upfront fees before they'd even look. None would guarantee a fix. Most couldn't tell me what they thought the issue was without seeing it. Nearly every one said it would be two days before they could make it out.

While we were emptying the fridge into coolers, Ryan — who closes 500+ transactions a year and has been doing this for 15 years — looked at me and said: "If this happened to me, I'd have it fixed in under an hour with my trusted vendor connections."

That one sentence is the whole reason Kiey exists.

The gap Ryan saw that the rest of us don't

Ryan built his real estate business the old-fashioned way: relationships. Over 15 years and thousands of transactions, he'd personally vetted a plumber, an electrician, an HVAC tech, a roofer, a handyman, a landscaper — every type of home services pro. Every vendor in his network had been tested, watched, and re-tested. He'd sent clients to them, watched how they handled it, and kept only the ones he'd stake his own reputation on.

For Ryan, "who do I call when my fridge breaks" is a solved problem. It is a three-second text to a trusted pro who owes him a lot of business.

For everyone else — including me, standing in my kitchen with 10 hungry people — it's Google, mixed reviews, and gambling.

What I'd been doing before Kiey

I'm Tyler Johnstone, co-founder of Kiey. Before this, I had a real estate software company called Team Leads that partnered with Keller Williams. We spent years building tools that helped real estate agents stay in touch with their homeowners. So the gap between "agents have vendor networks" and "homeowners can't find vendors" wasn't new to me — I'd watched it from the software side for a long time. The fridge was the moment I realized we'd been solving the wrong half of the problem.

The right half was this: how do you take Ryan's vendor network — the thing that would have fixed my fridge in an hour — and put it in every one of his past homeowners' hands?

Why Kiey works

When something breaks, most homeowners have no real way to find a good pro fast. The people who do — real estate agents like Ryan — have spent years earning those contacts. Kiey lets agents hand that network to every homeowner they've ever closed, in one tap, and stay in the loop every time it gets used.

Home purchases are the single largest expenditure most people will ever make. Maintenance adds up fast, and when it does, you want one place to turn — the agent you already trust, and the vendors they already trust. That's Kiey.

AI, photos, documents, vendors, chats — all in one place. Every home issue becomes a touchpoint between agent and past client. Every touchpoint builds the relationship agents spend most of their career trying to preserve.

Who built it