Inside Imagine Homes: Transforming Single-Family Rentals with Real Estate Tech

At Imagine Homes, we don’t simply buy homes—we invest in neighborhoods. We search through thousands of properties and find the ones that we can turn into homes that people want to live in. To achieve this, we rely on automated processes and state-of-the-art real estate technology.

We caught up with our new VP of Product and Engineering, Kirti Thakkar, to understand his goals and plans on how we can leverage technology and business automation to better serve our residents and sellers as we continue to grow as a company.

My name is Kirti Thakkar and I enjoy solving business problems using technology.

After earning an engineering degree, I joined a software services company which kickstarted my software engineering career. Since then, I have been in the technology industry for 18 years. Throughout my career, I have played many different roles within a software engineering group; sharing my expertise in technology in various industries like consumer banking, retail commerce, and higher education and my last position was in commercial real estate (CRE).

Most recently, I built a global leasing platform engineering group for JLL, the second-largest commercial real estate company in the US. We implemented the latest real estate technology stack for our applications as we collected and analyzed leasing information for millions of offices across the globe.

From the onset, Imagine Homes’ mission resonated with me.

I was contacted by the talent search team when I was working at JLL. When the recruiter mentioned that the company is in the business of residential real estate, it piqued my interest. I’ve been working in the commercial real estate (CRE) industry since 2018, and I have seen a paradigm shift in the CRE market with investments in Proptech.

After speaking with Imagine Homes’ CEO Jon Frank and the rest of the executive team, their mission to become a technology-driven organization resonated well with me.

That first impression has further strengthened over the last few months, as we expand on our data engineering practice and product mindset, to take Imagine Homes to the next phase of this journey. It inspired me to leverage my experience and background to help Imagine Homes become a data-driven technology powerhouse.

As a VP of Product and Engineering, I am responsible for leveraging technology to drive business growth.

I am responsible for our very own underwriting software, which uses our proprietary algorithms to determine our geographies and purchasing prices. Aside from that, I am also responsible for the data aggregation used for reporting our financials and business performance. Last but not the least, I oversee the overall technology roadmap of our organization as we go from a small-sized organization into hyper-growth mode.

One of my goals is to create the technological foundation that Imagine Homes needs in order to outpace its peers in the SFR space.

Our industry is still at a very nascent stage in terms of technology and our challenges are like a moving target. Technology plays a vital role in how we scale and grow.

We are looking to integrate multiple systems—both commercial and self-developed—into our business workflows using APIs and microservices.

Real estate is all about actionable insights from the data that we collect. You will be surprised that through our proprietary software we are already sifting through 25 million properties in our markets on a regular basis to identify the best investments. As we continue in 2023, my goal is to organize our data from various software systems and get real-time reporting which we can use to make better business decisions. In short, we are building a data warehouse for our business.

As we grow and mature, our business processes and operations will need to be more automated. We plan to leverage different robotic process automation and business process automation technologies in the next few quarters.

At Imagine Homes, we take pride in providing best-in-class experiences across the board.

We take pride in our work be it in real estate technology, renovation, or providing quality service to our residents. Imagine Homes is not an iBuying company that makes lowball offers and flips houses. Instead, we buy and invest in properties that end up raising the property value—which, in turn helps the neighborhoods these homes are in.

We renovate homes with quality materials and in the process improve the value and overall curb appeal of our homes.

When touring our properties in the Cleveland area, I learned about a couple of tenants who have been living in our property who had to change jobs and ended up requesting to lease another property from Imagine Homes; one that was closer to the new workplace. While this is only one example, it goes to show how Imagine Homes is preferred by residents as a landlord.

We focus on improving the experience with Imagine Homes’ brand at every level.

We have the technology and support staff to provide best-in-class service to our residents. Our turnaround times on service calls are improving month over month even though we are growing.

Imagine Homes, with its proprietary automated underwriting algorithms, is able to determine a fair price for houses where we do not make lowball offers to sellers and still extract value for our investors. Our automated underwriting system allows us to make quick and fair offers.

Imagine Homes is about caring for its employees and its customers alike.

This is something our customers and anyone doing business with Imagine Homes should know about us. Everyone at Imagine Homes is passionate about their jobs and we provide the necessary technology and tools for them to succeed.

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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