Student Housing Operators Answer to the Neighbors Too
By Richard Joseph Spinelli, Sandhills Real Estate
Move in week at a five bedroom house on a Belmont block begins with a rented van double parked out front and a household next door that was on the block long before any student arrived. I am Richard Joseph Spinelli, cofounder of Sandhills Real Estate, and this is written for anyone who runs student housing on a residential street, where the neighbors turn out to be part of the job.
Since 2022 we have been buying and renovating near Fordham University and its Rose Hill campus, and all 13 of our assets stand on Belmont Avenue, Lorillard Place, Bathgate Avenue or the streets just around them. None of those buildings stands alone. Every one of them shares a wall, a stretch of sidewalk or a curb with somebody who never signed anything with us.
What move in week looks like from the house next door
Saturday is the van. Five families arrive in one day, each with its own car, and for most of the afternoon the curb in front of the house belongs to strangers carrying mattresses and boxes of books up the stoop.
Next door, that curb is where somebody has parked on Saturdays for years. Nobody on either side is doing anything wrong, and by evening the block has already formed a first impression of the new household.
Sunday is the first night the house is full. Five people who just moved in together stay out on the stoop late, because it is the end of summer and the stoop is the nicest room in the building.
Monday is collection night, and a household that has never lived on this block has no way of knowing that. The bags go out a day early or not at all, and the neighbors see them long before we do.
Tuesday and Wednesday are quieter, which is exactly why they matter. The residents are figuring out the building, the neighbors are deciding what kind of year it is going to be, and whichever of us knocks first sets the terms. We try hard for that knock to be ours.
By Thursday the pattern for the whole lease is mostly fixed. Either the house next door has a way to reach someone who owns the building, or it has learned that nobody answers, and the second lesson is very hard to unteach.
Friday night is the first real test of whatever Thursday settled. If the house next door calls, it calls a number it already has, and the call is about one thing instead of a week of things saved up.
What that week asks of us is presence on the block. We walk the curb on Saturday, we leave the collection schedule on the kitchen counter, and someone from the company knocks next door before anyone next door has a reason to knock on ours.
The households on either side of a shared wall are often on very different clocks. The American Community Survey asks every household it reaches when it moved into its home, and on a street near campus the answers on the two sides of one wall can sit a generation apart.
Why neighbors are part of the job in student housing
The usual view in this business is that the resident is the customer and everyone else on the block is background. I think that view is wrong for anyone operating inside a residential neighborhood, and I would put it ahead of most of what gets said about amenities.
The household next door is a constituency. It never signs a lease with us and it still decides a great deal about what living in our buildings is like. A block that has given up on a landlord treats that landlord's residents as the problem.
Students already keep a private and running review of every landlord near campus, the idea I keep coming back to as reputation inside a closed student network. The block keeps a second review of its own, slower and longer, and it outlasts every group of residents who pass through.
Universities have understood this for a long time, which is why there is a whole professional body, the International Town and Gown Association, devoted to relations between campuses and the neighborhoods around them. A landlord renting to students stands in the middle of that relationship whether or not the landlord asked to be there.
Belmont makes the point sharper. It is the neighborhood known as Little Italy, home to Arthur Avenue, and it was a settled residential neighborhood long before the first off campus lease was signed on it. The households on these streets were here first, and most of them will still be here long after this year's residents graduate.
The city planning profile for Bronx Community District 6, which takes in Belmont, counts the people who live in that district year round. Our buildings are a small share of it, and the neighborhood owes us nothing for being here.
How a student housing operator answers a neighbor call
The rule we hold ourselves to is simple to say. A call from the house next door gets the same clock as a repair request from a resident, and it gets answered by someone who can walk over.
That rule only works because the buildings are close together. Everything we own sits inside one walking loop, the same loop I described in a post about storm response on these blocks, so a knock on a neighbor's door costs minutes rather than an afternoon.
Most of what the neighbors call about is small. The curb, the bags, a hallway light left burning, a stoop that stayed loud past a reasonable hour, a bicycle chained to the wrong railing.
Answering starts with listening. The neighbor usually wants two things, to know that a person heard it and to know what will happen by when, and a vague promise to look into it satisfies neither. So the answer names a day, and then the day is kept.
Then we go next door to our own residents. I would rather have that conversation standing in their kitchen in the first week than in writing in the third, because a group of five who hear it in person tend to fix it the same day.
The part of this another operator could fairly dispute is that we introduce ourselves to the neighbors before anything goes wrong. Plenty of good operators think that invites calls, and they are right that it does.
My answer is that the calls were coming anyway. A neighbor who already has a name and a number is calmer on the first call than one who spent a week trying to find out who owns the house, and the calm first call is the one that keeps the second call from happening.
We also close the loop, which is the step most often skipped. A short word back to the neighbor once the thing is fixed turns a complaint into evidence that the building has an owner who pays attention.
The neighbors also live with our work between leases. A renovation that runs from the last move out in May to the first move in of August puts trades, a container and noise on the block through the one stretch of the year that is otherwise quiet, so we tell the households on either side what is coming and roughly when it ends before the first truck arrives.
Where the block and the students cannot both be satisfied
Some of this has no clean answer. Five students in their first apartment and a household that has kept the same hours on the same block for years want different things from a Friday night, and no amount of prompt answering makes those two wants the same.
When that happens our job is to make the difference smaller and to be honest that it will not disappear. We ask residents for specific things, such as taking the late conversation inside after a set hour, and we tell the neighbors plainly what we asked for and what we cannot promise.
The cost is real and it lands on us. It means telling residents things they do not want to hear from the same person who fixes their sink, and it sometimes means telling a neighbor that we have done what we can and the house next door is still going to be a student house.
There is also a limit on what a landlord can ask of residents who are adults holding a lease. We can ask, explain and follow up, and past that point the residents decide how they live, which is the right place for that decision to sit even when it leaves a neighbor unhappy.
An operator who promises the block quiet is promising something the lease cannot deliver, and an operator who shrugs at the block loses it. The work sits in the narrow space between those two positions, one call at a time, and it is never finished.
It also sets a limit on how we grow. Every building we add brings a new set of next door households we answer to, which is part of why we keep buying close to Rose Hill instead of wherever a building happens to come up.
For an operator anywhere else, the practical meaning is that the service standard does not end at the property line. Answer the house next door on the same clock as your residents, walk over when you can, and say plainly what you cannot fix.
The students change every year, and the block remembers all of them.
Richard Joseph Spinelli is the cofounder of Sandhills Real Estate, a student housing owner and operator in the Bronx. More at richardjosephspinelli.com.
