Student Housing Renovation Needs a Gap Before Move In
By Richard Joseph Spinelli, Sandhills Real Estate
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 separate dates, and that treating them as one is the quiet reason so many units are technically ready and practically not.
The Case for Finishing a Renovation the Day Before Keys
Start with the strongest version of the other side, because I have made it. Labor is the scarce thing in a small portfolio, not calendar. When one crew covers every building within a few blocks, a day with nothing booked is a day bought and thrown away, and an operator who protects empty days on principle is paying for comfort.
There is also a plain reading of what a deadline means. The group was promised keys on a date. If the last coat of paint goes on the day before that date, the promise was kept, and the residential construction trades plan on exactly that logic, as anyone reading the scheduling guidance from the National Association of Home Builders will recognize. Everything after the last task is cleanup, and cleanup absorbs.
I ran several summers that way and the units did open on time. What changed my mind was not a disaster. It was noticing that every unit delivered on that schedule opened with a short list of small things wrong, and that the list was always the same list.
Handover Work in Student Housing Is Scheduled Work
The days between the last renovation task and the keys are not empty. They hold the final clean, the walk through, the punch list that comes out of the walk through, the keys cut and labeled for five bedrooms, the mailbox, the smoke alarms tested one at a time. Each of those is a task with a name, an owner and a duration, which is the definition of scheduled work.
Commissioning language exists for this in larger construction, where nobody assumes a system works because it was installed, and the Whole Building Design Guide treatment of building commissioning is the formal version of what a careful turn week does by hand. At our size there is no commissioning agent. There is a person with a flashlight running every tap and every window the week before a household moves in, and that person needs days on the calendar rather than hours between other things.
The cleaning is the part people underestimate. A renovation clean and a move in clean are two different jobs, because the first one takes out the dust and the second one takes out the smell of the first, and a student arriving with a parent notices the second one inside ten seconds. Booking both as a single line is how a finished unit still reads as a construction site on day one.
When those days have no room of their own, they do not disappear. They get performed badly in the gaps of the renovation, or they get performed in front of the residents during their first week, which is the version students remember and talk about. That is the same reasoning behind choosing durability over what photographs well, because both decisions are made for the fifth year of service rather than the first impression.
Renovation Contingency Belongs Inside the Renovation Schedule
The gap disappears in one particular way. Demolition opens a wall in a prewar house and finds something nobody priced, which happens often enough that it is the ordinary condition of this work rather than bad luck. The renovation runs past its date, and the days reserved for handover are sitting right there looking like slack.
They are not slack. The contingency for what turns up behind the walls has to live inside the renovation line itself, booked as renovation time, because that is the line where the uncertainty actually sits. A first walkthrough that starts in the cellar and ends on the roof reduces how much contingency a building needs, and it never reduces it to zero.
So the rule we work to now is that the renovation is booked to end a fixed stretch before move in, and a finish that eats into that stretch is recorded as late. Another operator can reasonably call that bookkeeping theater, since the unit still opened on the promised day either way. I would answer that naming it late is what holds the rule, because a date nobody is allowed to miss is the only kind that survives a busy August.
A renovation that finishes inside the handover stretch is late, even when it lands before the keys.
The practical effect is small and it compounds. The punch list gets written by somebody who is not also finishing the work, so it is honest. The group walks into a unit where the last person through was checking rather than building, and university housing offices hear about that difference, which is worth understanding if you have read how institutions think about off campus standards through groups like the association of college and university housing officers.
What the Gap Costs a Small Student Housing Operator
The trade is real and I will state it plainly. Holding that stretch gives the renovation a shorter summer than the calendar appears to offer, whether or not anything goes wrong.
Worse, at 27 units the people who set the margin are the people who need it later. There is nobody else in the room to refuse the request, so the stretch only protects the date while we treat it as already spent. Some summers we spend it anyway, and I have been the one asking.
The honest version is that we hold the stretch in the easy years and lose it in the years the buildings fight hardest, which is when a household most needs it held. I have no system that fixes that. The best I have is a rule written down before the summer starts, when nobody is under pressure yet.
What I will not do again is pretend the two dates are one date. A unit is finished when somebody other than the crew has checked it and found nothing, and the calendar should say so out loud.
Richard Joseph Spinelli is the cofounder of Sandhills Real Estate, a student housing owner and operator in the Bronx. More at richardjosephspinelli.com.
