I know this appears to be a duplicate of some other questions, but the answers are not working for me.
The issue has to do with the File Owner of the View Controller. It is probably set up as being IOViewController, thus you can only make property connections in that .h file.
What you can do, is create another .nib file for the subview and put the subview in there. Then in that .nib file, make the file owner IOSubview. Property connections will work just fine there. Then just add the subview to your IOViewController programatically. Just remember to load the nib file from bundle first.