Inside Imagine Homes: Building an Ecosystem that Brings Value

This year has been full of incredible growth for Imagine Homes as a company. We’ve expanded to two new markets (Kansas City and St. Louis) and welcomed a lot of new people into our different teams. To wrap up the year, we sat down with our CEO, Jon Frank, to talk about how we’re scaling our business in the single-family rental space, our challenges and successes given that growth, and the goals we have lined up for the coming year.

I always wanted to build buildings.

Maybe it’s because I’m from New Jersey and I was always jealous of New York City across the river, but as a kid I would think: “Wow, how come they have all the cool buildings?”

When I got to Brown University, I did my undergraduate studies and majored in Urban Studies. That was about as close as I could get to real estate at that point. After graduating, I started in the finance space and worked for a company called Clarion Partners. The work was essentially real estate banking, but I never really enjoyed it—because again, I wanted to build buildings. So I moved to Cincinnati where I did affordable housing as a developer and that was very exciting.

From there, I spent two years pursuing business at Harvard in Boston, Massachusetts and went back to real estate building apartments with Trammell Crow and with Village Green. In 2012, I ended up moving to China for five years for an entrepreneurial venture that I had started and which was unrelated to real estate—which is funny because when I moved there, we ended up doing some real estate anyway.

While that was an overall amazing experience, when I finally got back to the US, I was delighted to be back. And that’s when I heard about what the Imagine Homes folks were up to.

When I first bumped into Imagine Homes, my only concern was: can a company do what Imagine Homes wants to do at scale.

They had a great business model, obviously. But it’s one thing to buy a house and renovate it and rent it, but it’s another thing to buy 50 or 100 [houses] in a month and renovate that many and deliver that many.

But as I started to talk with the founders, it became clear to me that they had a pretty good plan. And while they hadn’t quite figured it out [in full] yet, they were well along the way.

So, I started as CEO in April of 2019, and the company had about 111 houses at the time; with half of them not under construction across two markets. Now, here we are today, three years in with over 1,000 houses in six markets across the Midwest.

We’re growing like crazy. We’re having a lot of fun doing it. And I’m delighted to be a part of the growth at Imagine Homes.

My vision for Imagine Homes was always that we could be better than everybody else.

When I joined, we were referring to all of the people that lived in our houses as tenants. And there’s something about that word—it just rubbed me the wrong way.

Because of that, I figured, Imagine Homes shouldn’t have tenants. Imagine Homes should have residents. ‘Residents’ struck me as just a little bit classier, especially given the houses that we’re delivering. These are upscale homes that we’re all very, very proud of.

So, I think it was my first day or something, and we went around the office in Cleveland, and we were putting up signs that said “Residents, Not Tenants”. That’s pretty funny and I feel that it set the tone a little bit for sort of a lot of the “best-in-class” stuff that followed.

It’s very important to us that we’re focused on being best-in-class. It’s why people join our company. It’s why people sell to our company. It’s real and it’s baked into all of our internal policies, procedures, and basically everything we do.

Of course, when we say that we’re focused on best-in-class, the obvious question is: What do you mean by that? What is “best-in-class”? Our answer to that is: we set that standard. We want to be better than everybody else. There’s no standard, because nobody is up to our standard.

We’re aware that the SFR [single-family rental] space is growing. We know that we have a lot of competitors and a lot of them are very successful. But ultimately, if our product isn’t nicer than theirs, and if our service isn’t nicer than theirs, then we’re not doing it right. If there’s anything I want [our clients and our vendors] to know, is that they can hold us accountable.

We’re a company that takes pride in the fact that we always do the right thing.

There are instances, especially in business, where you don’t have to do the right thing. Frankly, maybe you make more money if you don’t. Nobody in Imagine Homes wants to be part of a culture like that.

If you look at our mission statement, there are two pieces that stand out: one is to be “best-in-class”; the other is “always, always, always do the right thing.” That’s baked into our DNA. It’s who we are.

We’re not out to make lowball offers—we make fair offers. We’re not out to provide mediocre service, we’re out to provide best-in-class service.

We might not always be up to the standard, but we do our best. That is what we strive for. And it’s very real.

I think the culture that we’ve built within the company is probably the single thing that I’m the most proud of.

We’ve built a culture where people are excited about the work that we do. They feel good about the service and the houses that we’re delivering to our residents. People feel like the work that we do is meaningful, valuable, and that it’s making a difference in our communities.

It’s a great feeling for all of us at Imagine Homes, and I’m proud of the fact that everybody believes in our mission: which is to do the right thing and to deliver houses to a level that is truly best-in-class.

Again, we’re certainly far from perfect, but we have managed to keep the pace. It’s one thing to buy a bunch of houses and deliver, or struggle to deliver, that many houses. But to have the impact that we have across the communities to deliver 1000 houses? That’s a lot of lives touched and we take that seriously.

We’re not just creating a culture for our employees to enjoy. We’re here to create a culture that has a positive impact on our residents, our communities, and even our vendors. We’re proud of the fact that we pay fairly and that we pay on time.

It really feels like we’ve put together an ecosystem that a lot of different folks are deriving a lot of value from and that has become very valuable across the Midwest.

I think the single hardest thing that we’re up against as a company right now is answering the question: how do we staff the company adequately in order to sustain this growth?

We’re growing so quickly and it’s really hard to find people right now. The economy is good and a lot of folks are very selective about where to go, and how long to stay, and so forth.

I know that we’re struggling to find support on the maintenance side of our business for Maintenance Technicians and Maintenance Coordinators. We’re struggling to find people on the renovation side of our business for Renovations Coordinators and Renovations Managers. Our Reno Managers are struggling to find contractors who are willing and able, let alone excited, competent, and capable of doing the work that we need.

I could go job title by job title, city by city. But overall, it’s a really hard time to grow in business as quickly as we are seeking to grow.

Looking towards 2022, we have three big goals set for ourselves.

The first is that we need to open up three new markets in 2022.

It’s a big task. It’s going to be hard and it’s going to be expensive, because it’s going to require a lot of resources not just in terms of money, of course, but in terms of hours and manpower.

Thankfully, every market we’ve opened has gone more smoothly than the last. This past year alone, we opened up Kansas City and St. Louis, and opening up those markets were much smoother in the opening stages than any of the older markets. We’re getting better [at what we do]. So, calling it now: three new markets in 2022.

The second goal is that, as a company, we need to improve our customer service and our maintenance service.

This naturally ties back to our dilemma of how hard it is to recruit people in this market – because these people are very, very difficult to find. When we do find them, we now have to convince them to work with us. We start as strangers. They don’t know us and they don’t trust us yet.

We’re fully aware of our strengths and weaknesses. So improving those two areas on a company-wide and country-wide scale is a real area of focus for us, because now we have 1000 units and we need to solve how we service all of those units in a market where it’s very, very challenging and maybe even impossible to hire full time maintenance technicians.

Our third goal, given all the new markets and all the new people and our focus on service, is that we need somehow to not lose track of our company culture.

When I joined, we had 11 people. Now we’re up to fifty. With the kind of accelerated growth that we’ve been seeing, it’s important for us to maintain our company culture.

The only way we’re going to be successful in the new markets and the only way we’re going to improve our service is if our team is excited and if our team has bought into our mission. If they understand who we are as Imagine Homes—even if they’re new— then our team members become vessels of our culture.

So my third goal is to somehow maintain and even improve (imagine that!) our company culture.

That said, somehow we’re attracting the best of the best. It’s a great feeling. It means that what we’re doing is working.

While bringing in new people is our biggest challenge by far, I frankly don’t remember the last time anybody gave notice at Imagine Homes.

We have been able to get so many good people. And we’re lucky to have such an amazing team [across all our markets], especially against a backdrop where it’s so difficult to hire.

I mentioned that there are a lot of people who are in the SFR space. Today, it’s possible to buy houses without anybody on the ground. It’s also possible to hire a company to manage all the renovations and all the other aspects with just two fingers behind a keyboard and the internet.

We don’t do it that way. We have two—and in some cases three—acquisition staff on the ground in the market. We also have two, three, or even four renovation staff on the ground.

We are local. That’s a big part of what makes Imagine Homes what it is.

I’m not going to lie. It’s very expensive and it can be unwieldy, because we have all these people all over the different areas. But being local is a huge part of our competitive advantage and it matters to us that we get people who are local in all of these markets, in all parts of our business.

Our people are not just focused on the business. They are focused on our communities, because we’re a part of and live in these communities. I feel that translates into our residents’ experience.

One of my most memorable—and fun—anecdotes, is that someone left a letter for Imagine Homes on the countertop of the home after they left and it went something like:

“I just want to say thank you so much for treating us so well through the purchase. This is a very important home for us. We raised two generations of children in it and selling was very difficult for us.

“But the fact that you all seem to be such good people and you’re going to do the right thing for the property and take care of it makes us feel like we did the right thing by selling it to Imagine Homes.”

It’s very easy to get stuck in business, especially in my position where I manage many things. Generally, things only bubble up to me when they go wrong.

But every now and then, I bump into a story like that—and there are a lot of them out there. Hearing these stories is always incredibly rewarding.

Interested in working with us? Let’s talk.

We’re looking for passionate individuals to join our team and help us deliver best-in-class service, homes, and overall experience in 2022. If you think you fit the bill, let us know! We’d love to have you on board.

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