Student Housing Repairs Need a Small Bench of Trades
By Richard Joseph Spinelli, Sandhills Real Estate
A plumber walked into a fourth basement on the same block last winter and knew, before anyone said anything, which of the two shutoffs on the wall was the one that actually worked. He had been in the three houses before it. Nobody had to explain the building to him.
My name is Richard Joseph Spinelli. I am the cofounder of Sandhills Real Estate, a student housing owner and operator working around Fordham University's Rose Hill campus in the Bronx, where we run 13 assets and 27 units housing more than 100 students, all of it inside a few blocks of Belmont. This is written for anyone running a handful of older buildings who is still calling whoever is available. The argument is that concentration does something to your repair work that has nothing to do with how fast you can drive.
A Trade Who Knows the Building Diagnoses Faster
Most of the time a repair takes is not repair. It is orientation. A tradesperson who has never been in the building has to find the shutoff, work out which riser feeds which line, and decide whether the thing in front of them is original or somebody's later improvisation. In a house built before the war and worked on by five owners since, that can take longer than the fix.
In a five bedroom unit the orientation problem multiplies. There are more fixtures, more places a previous owner improvised, and more people who noticed the fault at different moments and describe it differently. A tradesperson who has worked the building before can walk past three of those descriptions and go straight to the thing that is actually broken. Someone new has to take all three seriously, because for them any one of them could be the real fault.
Somebody who has been in the building three times skips all of it. That is the whole mechanism, and it is unglamorous enough that it rarely gets counted as an operating advantage. It is also the reason two operators with identical response promises deliver very different afternoons.
Older housing stock is where this matters most, because older buildings are the ones that have accumulated undocumented history. The American Housing Survey is a reasonable place to see how much of the country's rental stock is genuinely old, and the Bronx sits well on the wrong side of that line. Our buildings are full of decisions made by people we will never meet.
You can write some of it down, and we do. Standards exist for how mechanical systems are supposed to be documented, and the technical resources published by ASHRAE are a fair benchmark for what a well kept building file looks like. But a file describes a system as somebody understood it on the day they wrote it. A trade who has stood in the room three times knows what the file left out.
How a Small Portfolio Builds a Trade Bench
The bench forms out of repetition
We did not set out to build a bench. It formed because every call went to the same few blocks, and the same people kept getting sent. After a year the familiarity was real, and after three it was an asset we would not know how to buy.
None of this was a plan. Looking back it is the clearest thing concentration gave us that we were not looking for, which makes me wonder what else is sitting inside the model that we have not noticed yet.
This is the part of concentration that does not show up when people describe it. One neighborhood is usually explained in terms of leasing and reputation, and those are true. But it also means every repair is a repetition rather than a fresh introduction, and repetition is what turns a vendor into someone who knows your buildings.
A file describes a system as somebody understood it on the day they wrote it. A trade who has stood in the room three times knows what the file left out.
What keeping a bench asks of you
A bench is not something you acquire. It is something you keep, and keeping it asks things of you that are easy to skip when you are busy.
It means paying on time without being chased. It means not calling at nine at night for something that can wait until Tuesday, and being honest about which is which. It means sending work in the slow months and not only in the week everything breaks at once. None of that is generous. It is simply what it takes to be the operator who gets called back first in August.
It also means being specific. A request that says the radiator is not working wastes a visit. A request that says which room, which valve, and what the resident already tried gets the right person carrying the right part on the first trip. That discipline sits on our side of the relationship, and when we let it slip the bench feels it before we do.
The other half is what sits on our own shelves. A walkable radius only produces a same day repair if the part is already close by, so we keep the things that fail most often within a short walk of every door. Proximity and inventory are the same decision wearing two faces.
The Risk of Depending on a Few Trades
Here is where the argument gives something up. A small bench is a small number of people, and a small number of people is a dependency. One retirement, one relocation, one genuinely busy season, and the advantage I have just spent several paragraphs describing is simply gone, along with the knowledge that lived in somebody's head and never made it into a file.
That exposure is not hypothetical, and it is not only ours. The skilled trades are a tight labor market almost everywhere, and the construction workforce data the Associated General Contractors publishes describes a shortage that has not eased in years. A small operator competing for that time is competing against everyone.
The dependency also concentrates in the worst month. Everything we own turns in the same few weeks of August, so the bench carries its heaviest load at exactly the moment we have the least slack to absorb a missing person. An operator spread across a metro has bad weeks in different places at different times. We have one bad week, and everybody has it together.
You can hedge it partially. We write down more than we used to, we try never to have exactly one person who can do a given thing, and we bring new trades into the easy work before we need them for the hard work. All of that helps and none of it replaces four winters of familiarity. I would still make the same trade, because a bench that can disappear is worth more than a rotating cast that never accumulates anything, but I want to be plain that it is a trade rather than a solution.
The honest version is that a concentrated portfolio does not remove operating risk. It changes what the risk is made of. Ours is made of people, which means it can be managed and cannot be eliminated.
Most of what makes a building run well is not written anywhere, and the shortest path to it is the person who has already been in the room.
Richard Joseph Spinelli is the cofounder of Sandhills Real Estate, a student housing owner and operator in the Bronx. More at richardjosephspinelli.com.
