Inside Imagine Homes: Streamlining Our Property Maintenance Process

At Imagine Homes, delivering best-in-class experiences across the board is at the heart of what we do. We caught up with our Maintenance Manager, Martin Loop to understand why streamlining our processes for every aspect of property maintenance—from winterizing to plumbing—is crucial to helping us grow as a business while keeping our residents happy.

I’ve been working in the rental and real estate space for almost three decades.

For about 20 years of my career, I worked in multifamily housing. I’m originally from California where I got my start in property maintenance, but moved to Minnesota early in my career. As luck would have it, I got hired as a groundskeeper, and since then I’ve held several roles and have stayed in this line of work.

I spent 11 months as a groundskeeper before being promoted to maintenance supervisor. I held that position for years until I decided to take a job with Sherman Associates working with some high rises as an engineer.

Then, I got offered a regional maintenance role at Trinity. Aside from helping manage their renovations, I was tasked to build and manage their maintenance team.

After that, I got offered a regional maintenance role at Trinity. They renovated every property they purchased. Aside from helping manage their renovations, I was also tasked to build and manage their maintenance team.

While working for Trinity, I got a call from a recruiter who offered me a job at Zillow Offers. During my face-to-face interview with Zillow’s team, they decided to offer me a higher position from estimator to renovation manager. I oversaw their renovations department in Minnesota–working on a team with 21 other people. At the time, there seemed to be nowhere else for my career to go but up.

Imagine Homes gave me a chance to stand up again.

Unfortunately, Zillow decided to shut down the renovation department and lay off 2,500 people across the country—and I was one of them.

That’s how Jake Holzman, Imagine Homes’ SVP of Operations, found me on LinkedIn. When he heard about the layoff, he sent me a message and said “call me when you’re officially done with Zillow.” So I did.

I actually didn’t apply to be in property maintenance. I applied to work as a project manager because Imagine Homes renovates their houses before they put them up for rent. However, Jon Frank, our CEO, looked at my resume and envisioned a different plan for me.

Prior to my employment at Imagine Homes, they did not have a dedicated maintenance team. That’s why my first goal was to hire a maintenance crew and get boots on the ground. It took me about two months to staff up most of our markets.

Imagine Homes offers reasonable wages.

I think the biggest challenge in staffing across seven markets is the varying wage expectations. There are a lot of people in companies in the rental business that don’t realize how much the wages have changed.

Pre-COVID wages are a thing of the past—they have dramatically increased. If you’re looking to hire maintenance techs and you’re still offering $18 to $19 an hour, you’re not going to find the people you want.

You’re not hiring somebody that doesn’t have a job. You’re competing for talent, so you need to be able to compete.

To make sure we found the kind of people for our teams, I bumped up what we’re offering and that made a dramatic difference.

Part of my responsibilities as a Maintenance Manager is to optimize our processes.

When I started working at Imagine Homes, we had around 1,100 open work orders. A lot of the work was completed but there was nobody managing our close-out process. So, we had a massive backlog of projects that were already done but nobody could keep track of them. That’s what I’ve been working on recently alongside my coordinators.

The cleanup is no easy task, especially the analytical side of it. Since the dawn of smart maintenance, I’ve had to develop new skills and procedures. I was able to put these new skills into practice when I wrote the maintenance policy and procedures manual for Imagine Homes.

For example, when we renovate and rent out a home, we put a 1-year warranty on the home. When a maintenance tech goes and fixes something, one of our coordinators will do research to see if it’s under warranty so they know who to properly invoice the work.

My vision for our maintenance team is to ensure that any issues that come up are fixed within 72 hours.

When any of our residents raises an issue about their home, our maintenance coordinators will contact them and perform a triage to evaluate the scope of work. We have a web portal for residents to open a new work order, and the coordinators work with the resident to schedule the maintenance job. All of that should be done within 24 business hours—which is what we’re able to accomplish right now for most work orders.

Depending on the issue, our coordinators can even handle work orders without visiting the home. Sometimes, all we have to do is walk our residents through resetting their breakers, unclogging toilets, and similar issues. It goes to show how many maintenance issues can be solved just by reaching out and troubleshooting with our residents.

If there is an issue that we can’t solve over the phone, we send one of our maintenance technicians out. Our goal is to ensure that a maintenance tech can visit the residence, do the repair, and complete the work order within 72 hours. But if the issue is urgent, but not a health or life-threatening emergency, we do our best to send someone within 24 hours. If there is such an emergency, someone from our team will address it right away.

Smart maintenance has been helpful, but not flawless, with critical and urgent work orders. I personally updated our smart maintenance system so it knows when to make a call, when not to make a call, and who to make the call to.

Now, smart maintenance will be able to discern when to message a maintenance tech or communicate with a plumber or electrician.

I was put in charge of solving the backlog issues and I implemented a streamlined invoicing process.

Our coordinators are now trained to conduct invoicing every day when possible or at least once a week. They make sure that any invoices that come in are inputted into the system on the same day. That step has brought our backlogs way down.

While working on our backlog is important, we also have to work on the new orders coming in. Maintaining a healthy balance of handling both is the key. Our goal is to finally clear our backlogs by the end of the year—and we’re actually pretty close to accomplishing that.

I am very thankful to have a team committed to preventing any more backlogs from popping up through proper management.

My vision is to help Imagine Homes grow and assist them in improving our maintenance process.

I want to help Imagine Homes grow and eventually hire field supervisors in each market that will oversee how we’re handling issues. Ideally, they should have strong knowledge of HVAC, plumbing, or other fields of maintenance so they can deal with anything big that comes up. They should also be able to share their knowledge and train other staff members.

The hardest part about doing my job is managing people from a distance.

Nowadays, I can do my work at home from Minnesota. However, I get text messages or calls from various markets including Ohio, St. Louis, and Pittsburgh. The biggest difficulty I find in remote work is that I can no longer go out into the field and help my team in person.

I’m used to being the one that people would call to help them figure out the best way to address an issue. It’s a learning process. and I’m slowly getting used to remote work.

Thankfully, I have a great team of nine people—and we’re on the lookout for a tenth to join us. Our coordinators are doing great work with each of them overseeing around 550 houses on average.

The best part of my job is the process of building teams.

I enjoy building teams which is something that I’ve been doing for over a decade now. But, when it comes to maintenance being able to go out and fix an issue a resident has with their home is the best part of my job. There’s a lot of pride in that.

While there’s no way to keep things in a home from breaking, being able to go out there and fix it for them and get a big thank you with a big smile from the resident—that’s the most rewarding part of the job of being a maintenance person.

My biggest success at Imagine Homes is building their maintenance division.

Building a team is hard work—there’s no doubt about it. It can be a daunting task for any leader, even CEOs. The hardest part of a leader’s job is not running their business but it is leading. That’s the biggest issue in the maintenance world where people are used to being micromanaged. There’s a difference between managing and leading, and I like to lead.

Building that team was probably the biggest thing I’ve done for Imagine Homes. I could leave right now and they’d be fine. To be clear, I’m not going anywhere—I hope not anytime soon. But if I ever do leave, I am confident knowing that as long as my techs and coordinators stay, they will be okay even without me. They have a crew on the ground now which they didn’t have before.

Experience all of the benefits and advantages of homeownership—in a rental.

Our residents deserve to feel truly at home. Beyond fully-renovated homes, our locations are also second to none. We make it so easy, all you have to do is come home.

Talk to our team—we’d love to know how we can help.

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