Richard Joseph Spinelli

By Richard Joseph Spinelli, Sandhills Real Estate The call comes in the second week of January and it is always the same call. A back bedroom on the top floor of a Lorillard Place house, one of five under that roof, is sitting at the temperature of a stairwell, while the front room two doors down the hall is warm enough that somebody has opened a window onto the street. I put my name, Richard Joseph Spinelli, on every one of those leases, and on a January morning I am also the person who climbs the stairs to stand in the cold room. Sandhills Real Estate owns and operates 13 student housing properties and 27 units around Fordham, most of them prewar houses and apartments in Belmont. In nine winters out of ten that call is the building doing exactly what it was built to do, and nothing in it has failed. Understanding that is the difference between a week of guessing and an afternoon of work. Why is one bedroom always colder than the rest of the apartment? Because the heat in an old ...

By Richard Joseph Spinelli, Sandhills Real Estate On a Monday in October the dryer in a five bedroom house on Lorillard Place stopped heating, and by Friday four different people in that household had told me about it separately. Every one of them was polite. Not one of them knew whether anybody else had already called. The landlord all four were trying to reach is me, Richard Joseph Spinelli. Sandhills Real Estate, the firm I cofounded in 2020, owns 27 units across 13 student housing properties in Belmont, a few blocks from Fordham, and we lease nearly all of them to groups rather than to individuals. If you lease to households instead of to people, you have had this week too. Duplicate maintenance requests in a shared student house Monday evening a text arrived from the second floor saying the dryer was turning but running cold. I answered it inside the hour, put the house on the list for Wednesday morning, and said so in writing. Tuesday at nine a different resident emailed th...

By Richard Joseph Spinelli, Sandhills Real Estate The cartridge in a bathroom faucet gave out on Lorillard Place on a Tuesday in the middle of the semester. Shutting the water off takes a minute and the work takes less time than the walk over. The only real question is which faucet goes back in, and that question has almost nothing to do with this bathroom. I am Richard Joseph Spinelli. Sandhills Real Estate, the company I cofounded in 2020, owns 13 student housing properties and 27 units sitting along Lorillard Place, Bathgate Avenue and Belmont Avenue, within a short walk of Fordham University's Rose Hill campus. Every one of those buildings is old, and every one will need the same small thing replaced again and again for as long as we own it. There are two honest answers to the faucet question. One is to pick a single model and put it in every unit we touch, whatever the room looks like. The other is to pick the fixture that suits each room, which is what a careful renovator...

By Richard Joseph Spinelli, Sandhills Real Estate Photo by Josephine Barham on Unsplash A student who needs somewhere to live next September often starts at a university office with a question rather than at a search page with a filter. We have been buying and renovating around Fordham University's Rose Hill campus since 2022, and that order has held every leasing season since. When a group asks me who they would actually be renting from, the answer is me, Richard Joseph Spinelli, and a student housing company called Sandhills Real Estate that I cofounded in 2020. This is written for operators and small landlords in other college markets who are deciding where to put their attention before spring. The institution in your market is a leasing channel whether or not you have ever thought about it that way. It is also the only party in the transaction that will still be there in twenty years. How Students Find Off Campus Housing Near Campus The search tends to run in a rough orde...

By Richard Joseph Spinelli, Sandhills Real Estate Photo by Anastasiya Badun on Unsplash A house a few blocks from Rose Hill changed hands on a Friday, and on Monday morning four people were living in it who had never met me. Their lease was signed by somebody else, for a term I did not set, under conditions nobody had written down anywhere I could find them. The student housing company I cofounded in 2020 is Sandhills Real Estate, and I am Richard Joseph Spinelli, which meant that from that Monday those four were my residents whether either side had chosen it or not. This is for operators buying occupied buildings in a market they already work, and for small landlords about to inherit a household for the first time. The strongest advice you will get is to leave that household alone until its lease runs out. I want to give that advice its full weight before saying why I work the other way. The Case for Leaving an Inherited Tenancy Alone The argument runs cleanly. The household did...

By Richard Joseph Spinelli, Sandhills Real Estate Photo by あま あわれ on Unsplash On a Monday in late October a toilet in a five bedroom on Bathgate Avenue would not stop running, and the repair took twenty minutes because the fill valve it needed was already sitting on a shelf a short walk away. I am Richard Joseph Spinelli, and the student housing company I cofounded in 2020, Sandhills Real Estate, owns thirteen buildings and twenty seven units within a few blocks of Fordham University and its Rose Hill campus in Belmont. If you run a handful of buildings yourself, the shelf is a larger part of your response time than the map is. A Week of Repairs in One Bathgate Avenue Building The Monday job was not skill. Anyone who has replaced a fill valve can do it, and the only reason it closed inside twenty minutes was that the right valve sat in a bin two buildings over. The same failure in a scattered portfolio is a trip, a store and an afternoon. Tuesday in the same house a kitchen fauce...

By Richard Joseph Spinelli, Sandhills Real Estate A stoop light out, a front door that catches only when somebody pulls it, and a window lock painted shut long before we owned the house. Those three come back every year, in house after house, and they turn up before anybody thinks to call them a problem. I walk our blocks most mornings and the same short list is usually what is waiting. I am Richard Joseph Spinelli, cofounder of Sandhills Real Estate, and we own and operate 13 student housing assets and 27 units in Belmont, a short walk from Fordham's Rose Hill campus. Thirteen assets of similar age and similar bones is enough to watch the same failures repeat instead of guessing at them. This is written for the operator deciding what goes on next week's schedule when something more visible is also waiting, and for the parent who wants to know what a landlord actually checks. Student Housing Safety Requests Repeat Every Year Across the portfolio the requests that read as...

By Richard Joseph Spinelli, Sandhills Real Estate Photo by taufiq triadi on Unsplash In the middle of October a group of five Fordham students sat around somebody's kitchen table and settled who was living with whom next year. Not one of them had looked at an apartment. My name is Richard Joseph Spinelli and I cofounded Sandhills Real Estate in 2020, a student housing owner and operator that buys, renovates and manages off campus housing around Fordham University's Rose Hill campus in the Bronx. If you run student housing in a college market, or you are a small landlord wondering why your leasing season feels decided before you open a single door, that October evening is the part of the process worth studying. Student Groups Decide Who Before They Decide Where A group does not arrive at a viewing as five renters who happen to know each other. It arrives as a household with a settled size, a settled set of relationships and an agreed bedroom count. The count is the part th...

By Richard Joseph Spinelli, Sandhills Real Estate Photo by Theme Photos on Unsplash Every summer I end up looking at a renovation schedule whose last task lands the afternoon before a group of five is due to collect keys, and the case for running it that way is a good one. The work finishes before the date it was promised for, nobody stands idle, and the building gets one more week of a season it badly needs. I am Richard Joseph Spinelli, cofounder of Sandhills Real Estate, and we own and operate 13 student housing assets and 27 units around the Rose Hill campus of Fordham University in the Bronx, so I have built that schedule myself and argued for it. This is for operators and small landlords who turn their units over inside one compressed stretch every year, usually with the same few people carrying the renovation and the leasing. The argument here is about which deadline the crew is working toward. My position is that the renovation deadline and the move in date are two separ...