Building Maintenance History Belongs in Writing
By Richard Joseph Spinelli, Sandhills Real Estate
A boiler in one of our Belmont buildings started short cycling on a cold Tuesday night, and the first useful question anyone asked was when it had last been serviced. Three of us had an opinion and none of us had a record. My name is Richard Joseph Spinelli, I cofounded Sandhills Real Estate in 2020, and we own and operate 13 student housing assets and 27 units within a few blocks of the Rose Hill campus in the Bronx.
This is for the operator running a handful of buildings with a small team, the kind of company where the founders still answer the phone. At that size almost nothing is written down, because almost nothing has needed to be. I want to argue that the building history is the one exception, and that it is worth writing down long before the portfolio is big enough to justify a system.
A Small Portfolio Keeps Its Building History in People
Our properties sit on and around Belmont Avenue, Lorillard Place and Bathgate Avenue, so the same few people have been inside every cellar we own. That concentration is the whole operating advantage of the company and it produces a strange side effect. The more often you walk the buildings, the less reason you have to write anything down about them.
So the history accumulates in conversation. Somebody remembers that the riser on one house was opened during a bathroom job two summers ago. Somebody else remembers which basement floods first and which one never has.
None of that is written anywhere, and all of it is real operating knowledge. Facilities people have understood this for a long time, and the building operations and maintenance guidance written for larger portfolios treats the service record as part of the asset rather than as paperwork about the asset. At 27 units the record still lives in three heads.
It shows up in planning too. When we sit down in the spring to decide which units get real work over the summer, the conversation runs on recollection, and recollection is generous about buildings people like and hard on buildings that gave somebody a bad week. A written history is duller than that and considerably more accurate.
What Belongs in a Building Record
The version of this that works at our scale is short. Date, building, system, what failed, what was done, and who did it. Six lines per event, written the same day, in one place everyone can reach.
The part I would add beyond that list is photographs taken before a wall closes. In prewar stock the most expensive thing you can lose is the picture of what was actually behind the plaster, because the next person to open that wall pays again for the same discovery.
A building record earns its keep two winters from now, in the hands of whoever walks into that cellar next.
Here is where I expect a working operator to disagree with me. Most small landlords who decide to fix this reach for software, and I think at this size the software is the part that fails, because a system nobody updates on a bad week is worse than a shared document nobody can blame for being ugly. Write less than the tool wants and write it every time.
Where it lives matters less than people think, provided it is one place and everyone can open it from a phone standing in a cellar. Ours is a shared document per building, in plain sentences, with photographs attached in the order they were taken. It is not tidy and it has never once been the reason a repair was slow.
Written History Is What Lets Someone Else Do the Work
I have written before about how a walkable portfolio changes who you can hire, and the argument there was that the route is learnable on foot in a week. That is still true, and it is also only half of the job. The walk teaches where the buildings are, and nothing about the walk teaches what has already been done to them.
Those are two different kinds of knowledge and they fail differently. Route knowledge rebuilds itself in a week because the buildings are still standing where they were. Service history does not rebuild itself at all, and once the person who remembers it stops answering the phone, the only way to recover it is to pay a trade to find out again.
That is the case for writing it down, and growth is not what drives it. It is about whether the company can hold the same standard on a day the founders are not there. Facility management as a discipline, which has its own professional body and its own body of practice, is mostly the organized version of that one idea.
It also changes what a maintenance visit is worth. A trade who arrives with a dated history of the system in front of him is answering a narrower question than a trade who arrives cold, and the difference shows up in how long he stands in the cellar before he starts working.
The same logic runs through the small bench of trades a concentrated portfolio ends up relying on. Those relationships carry an enormous amount of undocumented history about our buildings, which is fast while it lasts and is somebody else's memory rather than ours. A written record is the part of that we can actually keep.
Building Records Are Never the Urgent Work
The honest part is that nothing about this is ever urgent, which is why it is the first thing that slips. In August, when turn and move in take everything, the record is the work that gets postponed with no consequence anyone can see that week. Then the semester starts and the missing entry is two months old and nobody reconstructs it.
We have gaps. The first years of some of our buildings exist only as things people remember, and I do not expect to recover them. That is a trade we accepted by not starting sooner rather than a problem we solved.
Old buildings make the gaps more expensive than they look. Preservation practice has spent decades on exactly this question of what is original and what was replaced and when, and the preservation guidance published for historic buildings is largely a method for reading a building whose written history went missing. Reading a building that way is slow, and it is what you are choosing every time the entry does not get written.
If you are running a handful of old houses and none of this exists yet, the version I would start with is narrow. Heat, water and roof, one file per building, going forward only, with no attempt to reconstruct the past.
Backfilling is where these efforts die, because the reconstruction is enormous and the payoff is invisible. A record that starts today is worth more in three years than a complete history that never gets finished this month.
None of this makes a company better at housing students by itself. It makes the company legible, which is a smaller claim and a more durable one, and legibility is what standards survive on once more than two people are doing the work.
The boiler that started this got serviced, and somebody wrote down what was done to it. That entry is the cheapest thing we produced all winter.
Why building history belongs in writing connects to my pieces on trades and hiring, traced in a companion study.
Richard Joseph Spinelli is the cofounder of Sandhills Real Estate, a student housing owner and operator in the Bronx. More at richardjosephspinelli.com.
