I was taught that in normal speech, иметь is used primarily when you need to the verb "to have" in the INFINITIVE, as in "it's important to have an emergency escape plan." In other situations, using "у кого-нибудь (есть/было/будет)" sounds much more natural.

For example, there's a familiar saying Хорошо иметь домик в деревне, "It's nice to have a little house in the countryside." I don't know the origins of the saying, but if you do a Google Image search, you'll find many, many parody versions:



I assume the dragon (змей) is meant to be Горыныч (Gorynych), even though he only has one head and чаще всего у Горыныча три головы (more often than not, Gorynych has three heads).

P.S. Another thing they taught us in first-year Russian: есть is nearly always omitted when talking about parts of the body. For instance, У неё голубые глаза, "She has light-blue eyes," but У неё есть голубой попугайчик, "She has a light-blue parakeet." (Note that having eyes is an innate characteristic of humans, but having a pet parakeet is not! So using есть instead of omitting it will be favored in cases where "not having" is as normal/common as "having.")