Inside Imagine Homes: Building Better Communities

At Imagine Homes Management, our growth with single family rentals has always been driven by excellence, passion, technology—and the amazing people who make up our team. We caught up with our Regional Renovations Manager in Cleveland, Bill Melvin, to talk about our unique approach when renovating homes, and how this impacts our neighborhoods.

When Adam Pry [IHM Head of Acquisitions] first approached me about whether I would be interested in joining the company, I wasn’t looking for a job. But I’m in my 60s, and the idea behind Imagine Homes seemed like an exciting one.

Adam and I were next door neighbors back when I lived in a community called Hudson, Ohio. We became fast friends and had worked together on several projects where he had bought a couple of homes and I was brought on to renovate one.

That’s how I learned about how Adam and the founders of Imagine Homes were looking to get into the single family rental market, and their plans for what would eventually become Imagine Homes.

As a result, I became the company’s first employee and I’ve been with them ever since.

My career background has always been in and around the construction business.

I own a construction company and that allowed me to build several homes for myself and for other clients. I also worked for Hartville Hardware, the largest hardware store in America, as a Sales and Credit Manager back in the ‘90s.

Being the first employee in a fledgling company, Adam and I set out to discern or to determine what was the best avenue for creating a successful business. That meant that, in the beginning, I traveled with Adam daily, and we went and looked at countless homes and countless communities as to what we were going to buy. I was a product sourcer and also a teacher to Adam about the construction business.

The goal of any Imagine Homes renovation project is to create a rental experience that is equal to what a buying experience would be.

When we come in and evaluate a house, it’s not just about the aesthetics or the appearance. It’s also about safety. A 100 year old home has a lot of things in it that would be considered safety concerns or issues that a typical 20 or 30 year old house wouldn’t have.

For example, in some of the communities in Cleveland, which is an older community in the United States, I have done houses that are anywhere between 20 to about 115 years old. Each one comes with its own little nuances.

If the house is wired with aluminum, which has been found to be faulty, we will offer to buy it and then we rewire the entire house with copper. We check the furnace or the HVAC systems, because with 80% of the homes we have worked on, we have had to go replace the furnace and air conditioner.

We also go as far as checking handrails and stair rails to ensure that they are the proper heights by the national code. Stairwells have to be 36 inches off the ground, but in a lot of the older homes that we purchase, they are at 24 and 25 inches. Addressing these small details is something that benefits both adults and children alike.

So we basically touch every component of the house—from handrail systems, to roofing and windows—and we make sure that every component that has any safety issue to it is repaired or replaced.

We do things a little bit different at Imagine Homes. We create a much higher end product with very high-end finishes. This creates a great experience for the people who rent with us, but this approach also makes the home last longer.

We always do complete kitchen and bathroom demolitions. We install new cabinets, quartz countertops, and higher-end products that can be repaired and maintained. Most people come in and put the cheapest products they can and then when they go bad, they just replace them. That’s not what we do.

We’re out to create a more efficient home. So everything from LED lighting, to high quality paint for the ceilings, walls, basement walls, basement floors; to all the little finishes. All of these are done so that you end up with a house that’s basically more modern and new to the touch.

At Imagine Homes, it has become our mantra to work with local trade partners. We are not here to be their bosses—they are our partners and they work like partners.

These trade partners know exactly what we do and exactly what we do and why we do it. They’re not employees of Imagine Homes, but they are a part of the Imagine Homes family and they understand the culture that we have created.

My contractors know what I want. If I have an issue or a problem, they jump right on it; they’re out there the same day. I mentioned earlier that we often go in and replace the heating and cooling systems in the homes we purchase. Here in the Cleveland market, we have an HVAC contractor that works specifically for me. He goes to each and every house to check out these systems to make sure that there’s no carbon monoxide leaks. That HVAC company is one of the first businesses that we partnered with and they do all of our properties.

That culture—I like to call it the “Imagine Way”—has been pressed out to the other communities. We now have six markets [Cleveland, Cincinnati, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Kansas City] and in each of those markets, everybody operates with trade partners.

Even with a company as large as Home Depot, we have found that what works best is when we have a trade partner within their specific store that works with us. We’re not just calling some guy randomly and trying to explain to them what we do at Imagine Homes. They actually have people that specifically work with us.

A thing most people don’t realize that a home built in the United States has got 32,000 components that go into it. When you’re touching so many components, you need to have partners that understand these components and are willing to help you create a good environment.

The most important thing when you go into business is having a strong culture. It is also the hardest thing to duplicate.

At Imagine Homes, we have a culture that cares about the community, about the employees and the general overall well being of everybody involved. It’s this culture that I think is most important to the communities and the areas that we go into.

We’re not just a business. I often use the word family, because you have to treat your family with respect, and you care about what happens to them. From the residents who rent the product, to the guy that demos the house after we buy it—they all are so important to us and the community that we live in.⁠

The best part of what we do is that we’re not just improving the communities; we’re also improving the experience of our neighbors as well.

An interesting thing that happens is when we move into a community and we purchase a home, a lot of times they’re blighted; they have been neglected.

We’ve had one particular home in Solon where the neighbors came over and hugged my painter for painting the house and making it pretty again. People come over and have spoken to us about how proud they are of what we’ve done and how happy they are that we’re here.⁠

These are the things that mean the most to me at the end of the day. That the community and the neighbors are happy with what we’ve done. That what we do has encouraged people to improve their own properties. It’s kind of fun when we get in there and all of a sudden, we see neighbors are doing landscaping at their house, because ours looks better than theirs.

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. Talk to our team—we’d love to work with you.

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