Inside Imagine Homes: Building the Foundation for Excellence

From renovating high-quality single-family rental homes to provide for our residents, to engaging with home sellers via a hands-on approach that provides them the freedom to move on, carefree and fully-compensated—creating exceptional experiences is the key driving motivator for everyone here at Imagine Homes.

As we commit to growing our company while maintaining best-in-class service, we reached out to new Vice President of Operations, Jake Holzman, to share his thoughts on what that looks like moving forward and how we’re a cut above the rest.

Over the last 15 years, my work in real estate has been multifaceted.

I’ve been in operations, as well as on the investment side of the business. I’ve also worked in real estate lending and brokerage, and of course with technology throughout each of those. Role-wise, I’ve worn a lot of different hats and worked in a variety of areas. But the one thing that ties everything together is that my career has always been real estate-focused.

I’ve been in the business of single-family rental homes for a little over nine years. That makes me, to some degree, a dinosaur in an industry still feels like it is just getting started.

People have always owned homes and rented them out. But it wasn’t until the last 10 years or so when you saw rental homes owned at scale, backed by an institutional presence and professional property management platforms.

What ultimately drew me to taking on the job with Imagine Homes Management was the people.

I learned about Imagine Homes when an old friend approached me about an opportunity to help build something special. At the time, he didn’t share the company’s name. Instead, he spoke to me about their vision and how they were building a foundation for growth.

As I learned more, I was intrigued and that led me to meet with Jon Frank, the CEO of Imagine Homes Management. And after speaking with Jon, I knew Imagine Homes was something I wanted to be a part of.

Across all facets of this organization, I’ve found that Imagine Homes employees truly care.

They care about the work they do; they care about the homes that we provide. They care about the residents living in these homes. It’s a quality that you can’t really fake. And while I’ve only been in the company for roughly 90 days, I’ve found that everyone I’ve spoken to at Imagine Homes echoes that culture of caring.

That kind of culture is not something that you can teach. In my opinion, either your people and your culture have it or they don’t.

And because we have people who care, that allows us to be able to do all the big things that we aspire to as a company. While it might sound simple, it’s key to our foundation and for how we can be successful.

It’s been reassuring and energizing to have and feel that level of care in every aspect of the work.

As VP of Operations, my job is to ensure that we’re in a position where we can continue to grow at an exponential rate, to really scale our business, while remaining best-in-class.

When we talk about growth, the question I like to ask is: how do we build our foundation the right way?

When you grow as a company, you learn the things that work well, and you learn the things that don’t. My job is about taking the lessons learned from my experience in the industry—both the good and the bad—to make sure that Imagine Homes is successful in our pursuit of growth and excellence.

On a high level, I view a big part of my overall responsibility is making sure that the jobs of Imagine Homes employees are easier. That means I’m here to make sure they get the support—the people, the processes, and the technology—they need to do their jobs well.

We’re in a place where people understand what they need to do, how to be successful at the job, and what tools help them do that job. I hope that we can continue to build on providing best-in-class experiences for our residents, clients, employees, and vendors.

One of the things that I think will help enhance the culture at Imagine Homes is really building a culture of accountability.

When I say culture of accountability, it’s not just about an employee being accountable to their manager for doing the work they said they were going to do. It’s asking questions like:

• How do we build accountability across different geographies and different departments? Where somebody in Cincinnati, and the work that they’re doing, can be accountable to their counterpart in Minneapolis. Or how somebody on the acquisition side of the business can be accountable to somebody on the renovation side?
• How can I be accountable to my team, to Jon, to all Imagine Homes employees? How do we build accountability with our residents, our vendors, and our investors?

It’s something that I’m very excited to continue to weave into the fabric of Imagine Homes. Because when we’re all accountable to each other, that’s when we can start to build special things.

Moving forward, I hope that I can put us in a position where growth for Imagine Homes means that our positive impact in our neighborhoods and communities grows as well.

We’re just scratching the surface on what that can be today. As we grow and provide more high-quality housing options for more residents, there’s that increasing sense of pride in the neighborhoods and communities that we’re investing in.

People have chosen and will continue to choose Imagine Homes because we focus on exceptional experiences. If you’re somebody who wants to sell your home and do it quickly and at a fair price, we’ve done that. And we’ll continue to do so moving forward.

As for people who are looking to rent a home, there are lots of rental options out there as a whole. But it’s rare to find a high-quality product with the high-quality living experience that we provide.

The quality of the work that we do and the experience that we provide as a property management company is unique, and I think you’d be hard-pressed to find that anywhere else in areas where we operate. There aren’t many like us.

Imagine Homes is focused on providing exceptional experiences across the board: to our employees, to our residents who live in our homes, to customers who are selling us homes; to the vendors we work with to renovate and help lease and manage the homes.

This builds on what I mentioned earlier about how the company culture is at the core of what we do. You can build exceptional experiences when you have exceptional people—we have that.

Because when you have people who care deeply like we do, and you can give them the structure and tools to be exceptional, then you build exceptional experiences. That has a widespread impact across the entire organization.

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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