"We needed a team and a community that could grow with us." - Ray Hespen
Future corporate headquarters of Property Meld at 406 St. Joseph St.
Tech company constructing downtown headquarters
O
BY ELEVATE RAPID CITY
ne afternoon in the late winter of 2014 in Baltimore, Ray Hespen and his friend David Kingman, located in Albuquerque, were on yet another one of their work zoom calls. Except this time, they weren’t talking about work, but rather, living in an apartment. Both were lifetime renters. And both had grown frustrated with what thousands of renters find the first time their hot-water
28 ELEVATE • SEPTEMBER 2021
heater goes out. “You put in a maintenance request, and it goes into a black hole,” says Hespen. “It’s cumbersome. There’s way too many touch points. You get calls from numbers you don’t recognize. It’s just a mess.” They came up with an idea: starting a tech company to fix the mess. By May of 2015, the duo had done enough research with property maintenance companies to find out the companies didn’t
