This week, Invitation Homes is celebrating our 10-year anniversary. We’re proud of the growth and success we’ve achieved this past decade, the team that’s helped us build a best-in-class company and portfolio, and the superior service we’re able to provide to residents across the country. We’ve worked together to help solve housing needs in our 16 markets, while continuing to improve the resident experience. Our evolution as a company hasn’t been without trials and obstacles, but we’ve learned lessons along the way that have helped us create a leading single-family home leasing company. We’re excited to celebrate our first decade by looking at how far we’ve come and what we have in store for the future.
The landscape of the housing market changed drastically following the 2008 financial crisis, but it didn’t eliminate the need for quality homes at economical price points. Many people still wanted to live in a single-family home but may have been unable to do so given the state of the economy. Recognizing this need, Invitation Homes’ founders began raising capital in the subsequent years to purchase homes, all through smaller investors that had traditionally provided support. Eventually this activity caught the eye of Blackstone and other institutional investors, resulting in the founding of Invitation Homes and the purchase of the company’s first home in Phoenix in April of 2012.
As we look back at the recovery from the financial crisis, it’s clear that companies like Invitation Homes played a crucial role in helping the market regain strength. We supported the revitalization of neighborhoods by fixing up houses that had fallen into disrepair in the years after and helped create jobs across the country by opening local offices and hiring local associates and vendors to property manage and maintain our homes. If companies like Invitation Homes had not invested in local markets at this time, these houses would have continued to fall into disrepair, dragging down the property value of surrounding homes and holding back the economic recovery of these neighborhoods. The single-family home leasing industry played an important part in introducing a new housing choice into the market when buying a home wasn’t an option for many.
Starting in our very first market, we set out to professionalize the process for living in a leased single-family home by providing reliable, professional service across our entire platform in a way that is difficult for smaller individual landlords who still dominate the industry. Invitation Homes established investment and property management teams in-house, integrating acquisitions, refurbishments and leasing with the goal of replicating the practice across multiple locations. This approach proved successful, and Invitation Homes continued to grow as demand for flexibility and choice in housing increased as a dominant share of the millennial generation, the first raised during the rise of the on-demand economy, aged and entered the workforce.
Invitation Homes expanded its portfolio through organic growth and strategic partnerships and successfully established consistent, professional services that weren’t typically offered in leased single-family homes. These services have grown over the years to include utilities management , automation of air filter delivery , leading Smart Home technology , and a new maintenance app to streamline submitting requests for residents, as well as pest control and landscaping packages in certain markets. Our journey has included many opportunities to learn lessons along the way, particularly when we have incorporated other large portfolios of homes into our broader operations. As a result, we provide much better service than we did 10 years ago and will continue to refine our existing services and add new ones over the next 10 years.
As we look to the future, Invitation Homes hopes to improve the overall future of housing through continued investments in our residents and real estate at large. We are always on the lookout for new services or technologies that benefit our communities and make our residents’ lives easier – these investments help us set ever-higher standards for the industry as a whole. We anticipate that we’ll be able to leverage our scale over time to offer a wide variety of cost-effective services to our residents that enable them to create a far more personal experience. Ultimately, we hope to create a bespoke single-family home leasing experience that couples the highest-quality homes with the greatest customer service where residents can customize how they live and which amenities or services they receive.
Our primary mission at Invitation Homes has been, and always will be, working with residents to help them create a safe and comfortable home for their loved ones. Our commitment to the resident experience will continue to drive our growth as a company, and we’re excited to see what the next 10 years will bring for Invitation Homes and for our residents.