Storm Response Is Simpler When Every Building Is Close
By Richard Joseph Spinelli, Sandhills Real Estate
It rained hard overnight, the steady kind that keeps going long after you stop noticing it, and by six in the morning I was on a cellar stair on Belmont Avenue with a flashlight. My name is Richard Joseph Spinelli, I cofounded Sandhills Real Estate, and every building we own sits within a few blocks of Fordham University's Rose Hill campus in the Bronx. This is written for operators and small landlords who have to answer a weather event with a small team, and for anyone weighing whether a tightly drawn map is worth what it costs.
Scattered Buildings Turn Weather Into a Routing Problem
An operator with buildings spread across three or four neighborhoods spends the first hour of a storm deciding where to drive. That hour is not diagnosis and it is not repair. It is triage performed with almost no information, because nobody has laid eyes on any of the buildings yet.
The forecast from the National Weather Service office that covers New York City tells you what is arriving and roughly when. It tells you nothing at all about which of your cellars is going to take water this time. That answer only exists on site, and until somebody is standing there it is a guess dressed up as a plan.
The cost of the guessing hour compounds while you spend it. Water that sits keeps moving, into a floor assembly, into whatever a household left on the cellar floor, into the wall somebody finished in July. By the time a scattered operator reaches the third building, the third building has had four hours to get worse.
Student housing sharpens this further, because the people living in the building are frequently the last ones to understand what they are looking at. A group of five signing their first lease does not know that an inch of standing water near a boiler is urgent and a damp corner is not. The report arrives late, arrives calm, and arrives worded in a way that gives an operator no useful signal.
I think this is the most underrated argument for buying a concentrated portfolio, and I will say plainly what follows from it. Operators who spread across neighborhoods for risk reasons are usually trading a modest statistical comfort for a large operational one, and the trade tends to get made on a spreadsheet rather than on a wet morning. A thoughtful peer can disagree with me there, and many do.
One Walking Loop Covers Every Basement Before the First Class
Everything we own sits on or around Belmont Avenue, Lorillard Place and Bathgate Avenue, in Belmont, the Bronx neighborhood known as Little Italy. Thirteen assets and 27 units sound like a great many doors until you see how they are arranged, which is along a route one person can walk in a morning. After a hard rain the question stops being where to go and becomes what order to walk in.
After a hard rain the question stops being where to go and becomes what order to walk in.
The order is not complicated and it does not change much. The buildings with exterior cellar stairs come first, because an open stair is a funnel and the water is already there or it is not. Then the rear yards that drain slowly, then everything else, and the whole loop is done before the students heading to a nine o'clock class are out the door.
That difference in shape matters more than the difference in minutes. A routing problem has to be solved fresh every time, under pressure, by somebody with enough judgment to weigh four unknowns at once. A walking checklist gets performed the same way every storm, which means it can be taught, handed to somebody else, and improved a little each year.
It also means the information arrives early enough to be worth something. By mid morning I know which cellars are dry, which one has water at the bottom of the stairs, and whether this is a job for the small bench of trades who already know these buildings or for a wet vacuum, two fans and an afternoon. Deciding that at eight is a different day from deciding it at two.
Storm Preparation in Prewar Buildings Happens in October
Almost everything that determines how a building handles a storm happened months earlier, on a dry day, with nothing at stake. Gutters and leaders get cleared, area drains get cleared, and the grade at the bottom of an exterior stair gets looked at honestly while the sun is out. None of that work is interesting and all of it is the difference between a walk and a bad morning.
Old Bronx housing stock rewards this in a specific way. These houses were built by people who expected water, with pitched roofs, generous leaders and cellars that were never meant to be dry finished rooms. The failures are almost always something that got blocked rather than something that was designed badly, which means the fix is attention rather than capital.
Building science guidance on moisture management is mostly one long argument for keeping water moving away from a structure and never letting it pause anywhere near it. A blocked leader is the cheapest possible way to violate that, and it takes about twenty minutes to undo. I have never once regretted the day in October that got spent on drains.
Density helps here as well, because the October walk is the same walk as the storm walk. One person clears every drain on the route inside a day, and that person is the one who will be standing over those drains in a hard rain two months later. No vendor contract produces that feedback loop, because the person who cleared the drain and the person who sees the result are never the same person.
The resident side of this happens in October too. Through Live Off the Hill, the leasing brand we run in house, we tell groups plainly at move in what should never sit directly on a cellar floor and why, and we put shelving where the temptation is worst. It is an unglamorous conversation that saves a great deal of somebody's property, and it works far better before a storm than during one.
Concentration Means One Storm Reaches the Entire Portfolio
Here is the honest limit, and it is not small. The same geography that lets one person check everything means one storm reaches everything at once, and there is no building in another part of the city having a quiet morning to balance the ledger. A bad enough event does not touch a portion of what we own, it touches all of it.
We accepted that rather than solved it, and the acceptance is visible in how we operate. We carry more redundancy than a company of this size normally would, in pumps, fans and dry stock that sit unused for most of the year in a storage room that is expensive in every sense. A single serious storm can also consume a week that had been planned for something else entirely, and in August that week does not exist to give.
Research on how buildings hold up in severe weather keeps arriving at the same conclusion, that preparation outperforms response by a wide margin. That is a comfortable finding until you are the one funding preparation across 13 buildings that are all standing in the same weather on the same morning. The concentration that makes the response cheap is exactly what makes the preparation expensive.
I would still rather carry the concentrated version of that exposure than the scattered version, because the scattered version costs me something every single storm while the concentrated version costs me badly only rarely. That is a judgment about frequency, not a proof. Somebody running a portfolio with more than 100 students in it in four different neighborhoods has an entirely defensible case for the opposite view.
For an operator deciding how tightly to buy, this is the trade sitting underneath the map, and it is worth naming before the first purchase rather than after the first storm. A concentrated portfolio converts the ordinary chaos of the operating year into routine, and converts the rare catastrophic day into something that lands everywhere simultaneously. Weather is the clearest test of that bargain, because it arrives without asking and grades the answer the same morning.
Richard Joseph Spinelli is the cofounder of Sandhills Real Estate, a student housing owner and operator in the Bronx. More at richardjosephspinelli.com.
