Inside Imagine Homes: How We Grew from the Ground Up

As a company, we’ve come a long way from our first single-family rental unit in Hudson, Ohio and have grown our operations to include more markets in the Midwest. In this new installment of Inside Imagine Homes, we catch up with Dan Andresen, Vice President of Strategy. Learn more about how he came to work for Imagine Homes, how his past experiences contribute to the business, and what it means for us to Be Local.

My name is Dan Andresen and I’m from Cape Cod, Massachusetts. I’ve been at Imagine Homes for a little over four years now, which is almost as long as the company has been around.

My role at Imagine Homes is Vice President of Strategy. It’s an interesting, exciting, and ever-changing role, especially when there’s growth involved. It’s broad, because we’re still figuring everything out, which means a lot of problem-solving and critical thinking.

Prior to joining the company, I was a sailor and a US Merchant Marine, starting off as an OS (ordinary seaman) before I worked my way up to Chief Petty Officer.

Working with Imagine Homes is technically my first job in real estate, although I was in finance for a little, residential construction a lot; spending some years in a residential home building business on Cape Cod. The experience in those areas turned out to be the most valuable work background that I would eventually bring to this company.

My engineering experience has been helpful in my time because systems, procedures, problem-solving, and critical thinking are universally applicable. And in a small company within the real estate industry—one that is young, evolving, and growing—having a diverse work background is a plus for me and the business.

Scalability is crucial in building a business which requires systems, procedures, and vendor relationships.

In our work, the renovation is the most demanding aspect, especially since it’s challenging to renovate a lot of homes at almost the same time. That’s where my construction experience is an asset, regardless of not having any real estate background. That experience helped us get that part of the business off the ground.

The engineering stuff is largely systems and procedure use. It’s critical to set a system up so that it does what you need it to do, and from there, create a procedure aligned with those systems. That way, anybody can show up and look at that procedure and execute on that system. Those are two very valuable things when it comes to this business.

The path I took to being a part of Imagine Homes was unusual—and a bit funny. I went to the same college as one of the co-founders and he and I ended up as lifelong friends.

We had met up years after college so I could meet his newborn son and that’s when he began to talk about this opportunity that he’d been working on and thinking about for a while. Though my combination of experiences was relevant and his idea sounded cool, I still went back to Singapore and worked in the shipyard.

Half the time, life doesn’t work the way you expect it to. After sailing from Singapore and spending 43 challenging days at sea, I got back to the US Gulf Coast. That’s when I realized that I was ready to join Imagine Homes. So you could say that a particularly bad voyage at sea led me to this extraordinary opportunity.

Joining Imagines Homes allows me to work with great people. The fact that this company is a group of really good people in all facets of what we do, that always stands out.

Two of the vital things that make me feel good about what we’re doing are working with good people and improving communities. Those two things make me incredibly proud to work here.

We are also seeing real growth as we bring the Imagine Homes model elsewhere. We began in Cleveland and moved towards Cincinnati, which is in the same state but otherwise a world away. At that point in the business, there just wasn’t a lot of infrastructure set up from a system’s procedure. So getting the Cincinnati market off the ground has helped to facilitate much of our growth.

Although it’s the local teams that are doing most of the hard work, that I have a hand in doing the hard work that’s ongoing is something that makes me feel proud.

We’re now in six markets and counting: Cleveland, Cincinnati, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Kansas City, and more on the way. I believe that just shows that we’ve solved a lot of problems, figured a lot out, and made a lot of progress. Still, at the end of the day, work continues, and I’m mostly still and will always be a part of that work.

To sum it all up, I’d say that helping to get the Cincinnati market going, all of the problem solving, and kind of dynamic thinking that went into that are factors that I look back upon very fondly.

Imagine Homes is a company full of very good people who are doing good work. And we really do value the fact that we are improving communities and creating jobs.

Working in the communities we’re part of means that we have local people in every market. That colors the way that we operate within those cities. In those neighborhoods there’s a sense of ownership.

It matters to us that we are part of these communities, and not just people from elsewhere coming in and gobbling up real estate. These communities are where our people live. They are where they work and where they send their kids to school. That’s extremely important.

We’re in this business and in these cities for the long haul. We’re citizens, we’re residents, and that is easily lost when people talk about this industry and this business. So that is something that I think is worth overstating.

Interested in working with us? Let’s talk.

Everyone at Imagine Homes Management answers to the same calling: excellence. We love investing in neighborhoods and we are out to raise the bar in the real estate universe.

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