A Walkable Portfolio Changes Who You Can Hire

By Richard Joseph Spinelli, Sandhills Real Estate

A new hire started on a Tuesday and I did not hand them a map. I handed them a route, a loop that begins on Belmont Avenue, turns onto Lorillard Place and finishes on Bathgate Avenue, and by noon they had stood outside every door we own. My name is Richard Joseph Spinelli and I cofounded Sandhills Real Estate in 2020, a student housing owner and operator that buys, renovates and manages housing around the Rose Hill campus of Fordham University.

This is written for operators running student housing in other college markets, and for small landlords deciding whether concentration is worth the risk that comes with it. Almost every argument for density is an argument about maintenance speed or leasing. The one I want to make is about hiring, and it is the one most operators never think to count.

A Walkable Student Housing Portfolio Is Learnable on Foot

We own 13 student housing assets and 27 units, home to more than 100 students, and we have been buying inside the same few blocks since 2022. The practical consequence is that the entire company can be seen in a single morning walk. Nobody has to be told what the portfolio is, because they can look at it.

That changes what the first week of a job is. A new person on a scattered portfolio spends their first month learning a driving order and a dispatch system, and the buildings stay abstract for a long time. A new person here builds a physical index in a few days, and after that every request arrives attached to a place they can picture.

It also means training happens in the same motion as the work. When I walk the loop with someone new I am checking the same things I would have checked alone anyway, and the explaining rides along for free. That is the same compounding effect that builds a small bench of trades who know the buildings by name, except it applies to the people on payroll.

The loop itself is ordinary and that is the point. Stoop lights, front door latches, cellar doors after rain, the parts shelf, anything a resident flagged since the last pass. A person who has done it four times knows what the normal condition of each building looks like, which is the only way to notice that something has changed.

None of that is unique to us. What is unique is the compression. In a market where the whole portfolio sits inside a walking radius of one campus, the gap between a person who has never seen the buildings and a person who is useful is measured in days rather than in seasons.

Hiring for Student Housing Widens When the Route Is Short

Here is the claim a peer could reasonably fight me on. I would rather hire someone who can walk the loop, remember it and be trusted alone in a resident's apartment than someone with five years of experience spread across a metropolitan area.

Experience across many buildings teaches breadth, and breadth is genuinely useful at a larger company. At 27 units breadth is rarely what binds. What binds is whether a person can hold one neighborhood in their head and show up when they said they would.

At 27 units breadth is rarely what binds. What binds is whether a person can hold one neighborhood in their head and show up when they said they would.

That reframing widens the pool in ways that matter in the Bronx. A candidate does not need a car. They do not need to have already worked in property management, and the education that trade bodies such as the Institute of Real Estate Management and the National Apartment Association put in front of onsite staff is something we can add later rather than something we have to screen for on day one.

What we screen for instead is judgment under a resident first standard, because the person walking the route is the company as far as a household is concerned. The building knowledge follows quickly. A new operator can read a general reference on multifamily residential building systems in an evening, but nobody can read their way to knowing which basement door sticks in August.

I ran a 42 mile Last Man Standing race in Portland, Maine once with no formal training and no prior race experience, which is a loop repeated until you stop. I do not recommend that as a preparation method for anything. It did teach me that the same short course covered again and again stops being a course and becomes something you know, and that is closer to how this job is actually learned than any curriculum I could write.

What the Walk Teaches Never Fits in a Handbook

The honest limit is that almost none of this transfers on paper. The knowledge that makes somebody fast here is local and undocumented, and it accumulates in the exact order they encountered it.

Which stair tread needs a hand on the rail. Which radiator in which back bedroom is the one that gets a call every January. Which block goes loud the first week of September and which stays quiet. I have written more of this down than I used to and I will keep writing it down, and I am under no illusion that the document does the work the walk does.

Writing it down is still worth doing. We keep a record for each building now, service dates, what was replaced, what was left original during renovation, and it makes a second person capable of covering a week without calling me. A record moves facts. It does not move the pattern recognition that comes from having stood in the same cellar in four different seasons.

So a departure costs more than the role suggests. Losing a person who has walked the loop for a year sets us back further than the job description implies, and that risk is created by the same concentration that made them useful so fast. It is a trade we accepted rather than a problem we solved.

There is a second limit worth saying plainly. Because every building sits within a few blocks of the others, nobody on this team gets to learn a different market or a different building type by moving across town. Anyone who wants that will have to go somewhere else to get it, and I would not argue them out of it.

For an operator weighing concentration in another college market, this is the part of the case that does not show up in an underwriting model. Density shortens response time and it simplifies leasing, and both of those are easy to describe. It also quietly rewrites your hiring profile, lowers the experience you have to buy, and puts more of your operating knowledge in the legs of whoever is walking the block this morning.

The route is the training program, and it is also the thing we cannot hand anyone on their last day.

Richard Joseph Spinelli is the cofounder of Sandhills Real Estate, a student housing owner and operator in the Bronx. More at richardjosephspinelli.com.