Assess an Old Building From the Roof and the Basement
By Richard Joseph Spinelli, Sandhills Real Estate
A first walkthrough of a building I might buy starts in the cellar with a flashlight and ends on the roof, and the apartments in between get the least of my attention. My name is Richard Joseph Spinelli, and since 2022 my company has been buying, renovating and operating student housing within a few blocks of the Rose Hill campus in the Bronx. If you buy old housing stock anywhere, the order of that walk is the part worth taking.
The rooms are what everyone wants to talk about on a first visit. They are also the part of the building I can change. The roof and the cellar are the two places that decide whether the building is worth owning at all, and neither one negotiates.
The Roof Decides How Much Time a Buyer Actually Has
Water is patient and it travels. A roof that has been failing quietly for a few winters does not announce itself on the top floor, it announces itself years later in a wall two floors down, in plaster that keeps coming back soft after it has been repaired twice.
So I want to know what the covering is, how old it looks, what the flashing and the parapet are doing at the edges, and whether anybody has been up there recently enough to say. The Park Service brief on roofing for historic buildings is a short education in what those failures look like on older construction.
None of it requires a specialist to see. It requires somebody to climb up and look, which is the step that gets skipped.
On the older houses around here the roof is rarely the steep thing people picture. It is a low deck behind a parapet, with edges and drains that do the failing long before the middle of the field does. The edges are also where the last repair was usually done in a hurry.
What I am really buying on the roof is a calendar. A sound covering means the building can wait while the leasing year runs its course and the work gets scheduled into the months when the units are empty. A covering at the end of its life means the building sets the schedule instead, and it will pick August.
The Basement Tells You What the Building Has Been Through
The cellar is the honest room. Nobody stages it, nobody paints it before a walkthrough, and everything that has ever gone wrong in the building has left a mark down there.
I look at the base of the walls for the line that water leaves, at the floor around the drains, at the heating plant and the runs coming off it, and at how the repairs were done. A building where every repair was a neat, complete job is a building that had somebody paying attention. A cellar full of partial fixes stacked on top of each other tells me the same thing about the twenty years I did not witness.
Moisture is the condition that does the most damage over the longest period, and the building science guidance on moisture management explains why the cheap looking problem in a cellar so often turns out to be the expensive one. Smell matters too. A cellar that smells of damp in dry weather is telling you something that no photograph in a listing will.
The heating plant gets its own few minutes. In a house full of students the heat is the service that cannot fail in January, and a boiler near the end of its working life is a capital decision that has already been made for me by somebody else. I want to know that before I own it rather than during the first cold week.
I also want to see where the water comes in, where the gas line runs, and how much of the electrical work down there is original. Those three answers set the order of everything that follows, because none of them can be done politely around a household that is already living upstairs.
The cellar is the honest room. Nobody stages it, nobody paints it before a walkthrough, and everything that has ever gone wrong in the building has left a mark down there.
The Apartments Are Mostly a Renovation Question
This is where I will lose some operators. I will take a sound roof and a dry cellar over a finished kitchen every time, because one of those is a renovation and the other is a decade of arguments.
Plaster, floors, kitchens, bathrooms and paint are all work I know how to scope and schedule. They are unpleasant to pay for and they are finite. A building that needs all of them is a renovation project with a known shape, and a renovation project is something a small operator can plan around.
There is one exception I hold to, and it is the bedroom count. We lease mostly three, four and five bedroom apartments and townhouses to groups of students, so a building that cannot be made to hold a group is not a candidate no matter how good its bones are. Structure sets that limit, and prewar buildings are not shy about where the walls have to stay.
The walk also writes the first draft of the renovation. By the time I come back up the cellar stairs I know roughly what has to happen before a group can live in the building, what can wait a year, and which of it has to land between the last move out in May and the first move in of the fall.
That is a different exercise from deciding what the units should look like. A student household notices a finished unit on day one and remembers a warm bedroom in February, and only one of those is decided in the apartment itself.
Everything else on that list is a question of sequence. The unglamorous work goes first and the visible work goes after it, which is an order that looks wrong in photographs for a year or two.
What the Walk Cannot See Is a Trade We Accept
The walk reduces surprise. It does not remove it, and any operator who tells you otherwise has not opened enough walls. Conditions in old construction announce themselves during demolition, and we have found things in these houses that no flashlight was ever going to reveal.
What the roof and the cellar buy is a narrower range of outcomes, not certainty. That is worth the hour it takes, and it is still only an hour against a hundred years of building. Most of the housing stock in this country is decades old, and the American Housing Survey is a useful reminder of how ordinary that condition is.
The other cost is the buildings we walk away from. Our pipeline is small already, a few blocks around Belmont Avenue, Lorillard Place and Bathgate Avenue, and 13 assets and 27 units is not a portfolio that absorbs a bad purchase quietly.
Passing on a building because of its roof feels expensive on the day. It is cheaper than the alternative, which arrives in a January when everything else is also happening, and every one of those buildings sits on the same walking loop. That is the other half of why storm response is simpler when every building is close.
So the order of the walk is the discipline. Start underground, finish on the roof, and treat the apartments as the part of the building that is still up for discussion.
The order of that first walk comes back in my writing on buying and renovating, followed in the longer reading of this post.
Richard Joseph Spinelli is the cofounder of Sandhills Real Estate, a student housing owner and operator in the Bronx. More at richardjosephspinelli.com.
