The Student Housing Year Is Planned Around August
By Richard Joseph Spinelli, Sandhills Real Estate
Walk Lorillard Place on a Tuesday afternoon in late October and almost nothing appears to be happening. The units are full, the leases are signed, the group that argued over the big bedroom back in April has long since settled, and the phone is quiet enough to answer on the first ring. I am Richard Joseph Spinelli, cofounder of Sandhills Real Estate, and I have been buying, renovating and operating student housing around Fordham University's Rose Hill campus in the Bronx since 2022.
I have stopped trusting that quiet. The work that decides next August is already underway in October, and almost none of it is visible from the sidewalk. A visitor would reasonably conclude that this is what the business looks like most of the time, and the conclusion would be exactly backwards.
That is the shape of the student housing year as I have come to see it across thirteen assets and twenty seven units in Belmont. Almost everything consequential happens inside a few weeks at the end of the summer, and the other eleven months exist to make those weeks survivable. The calendar is not evenly loaded, and no amount of operating discipline makes it so.
Why does student housing turn over all at once?
Because the academic calendar sets the date and no operator in the market can move it. Fordham fixes returning student move in to a pair of days at the end of August, so leases across the neighborhood end and begin inside the same short window whether or not anyone is ready.
That single constraint travels through everything else. A group of five signing for a house on Bathgate Avenue accepts a start date rather than choosing one, and so do I. Every renewal conversation, every showing, and every repair that has to be finished before a key changes hands gets measured against a date nobody at the table controls.
The concentration is national rather than local. About 19 million students attended colleges and universities in the United States in the fall of 2022. Across the country people change residence most often in the summer, with June and August the heaviest months of the year.
Student housing feels that squeeze harder than the rest of the rental market does, because a student lease is written to the academic year and almost never to anything else.
The practical effect is that an operator loses the ordinary tool other landlords use, which is staggering. A conventional building with twenty seven units might see those units come up across twelve months, so a slow month absorbs a bad week. Here they come up together, and a slow week has nowhere to go.
The early tell shows up in October
It took a few cycles before I could see the pattern clearly. The houses that go badly in August are almost always the houses that still had open items in October, and the tell is never dramatic. It is a punch list nobody closed, a part that was ordered and never chased, a stair that got looked at and left.
The October pass is unglamorous. Someone walks every unit, lists what has been deferred, and puts a month against each line, and the only skill involved is refusing to assign a month that is already full. Most of what goes wrong in August is an item that never got a month.
Two houses a block apart make the point. In the first, the systems work was booked for November and done while the building was occupied and calm, which was awkward for everyone living there and finished well before anyone needed the apartment vacant. In the second the same work waited for June, collided with turn, and became the reason a group moved in on a Thursday instead of a Saturday.
Neither outcome was caused by August. Both were caused by a decision made nine or ten months earlier about when a building could afford to be opened up, and by the time August arrived that decision had stopped looking like a decision at all. It looked like weather.
The exception is a building bought in the spring. An acquisition that closes in May never gets its October, so the first year on a new house is run without the planning layer that makes the rest of the portfolio predictable, and I have learned to budget time rather than confidence for it.
What do student housing operators do in the quiet months?
They do the work that August cannot absorb. From October through May the buildings are occupied but stable, and that is the only stretch long enough to take a bathroom apart, replace a riser, or rebuild a stair without a move in date pressing against the schedule.
So we load those months deliberately. Systems and envelope work gets booked when the trades are actually available and the weather allows rather than when the units happen to be empty, and we accept that an occupied building is a harder and slower place to work. The alternative is a June and July asked to hold everything that was deferred into them.
Being able to work this way is a function of the radius. Every building sits within a walk of every other one, so a crew that finishes early on Belmont Avenue in February is twenty minutes from the next thing on the list, and small jobs stop needing their own day. Density is what turns a thin winter schedule into a usable one.
It also changes what I protect. I have written before about why student housing renovation needs a gap before move in, and that gap only survives if the heavy work was finished months earlier. A plan that relies on the gap to catch up is not a plan.
This is where another operator would push back, and I understand the argument. Booking work in the expensive window and turning down cheap summer availability looks like leaving money on the table, and for a portfolio spread across several markets it probably is leaving money on the table.
An operator who schedules work by price is scheduling August by accident.
For one neighborhood running on one calendar, I treat the difference as the premium paid for a move in week that holds. I would rather spend more in February than explain a delay in August to a group of five who planned their year around a date I gave them.
Planning the year backwards is also what makes a small portfolio behave like a company. Thirteen assets and twenty seven units is enough to need a schedule that exists independently of whoever happens to remember what needs doing, which is most of what I mean when I argue that a portfolio this size is a real operating company. The schedule is the company, more than any of the buildings are.
A year with one critical month carries no slack
What this costs is a year with nothing to fall back on. A business whose results concentrate into a few weeks gets no second attempt inside the same year, and a bad August is carried all the way to the next one. Everything described above is an attempt to lower the odds of that rather than a method for recovering from it.
There is a second expense that is easier to hide from yourself. Loading the quiet months means paying for readiness that may turn out to be unnecessary, and it means a team sized for the last two weeks of August is underused in February. I have not found a way to avoid both of those at once.
Planning backwards also means committing in October to guesses about June. Trades get booked, materials get ordered, and the schedule hardens around assumptions that a renewal season has not tested yet. Some of those commitments turn out to be wrong, and they get paid for anyway.
The version of this I would defend is narrow. It works because the portfolio is small, the geography is tight, and the leasing calendar is the same one for every unit, which is a set of conditions most operators do not have. An owner with buildings in four markets on four academic calendars would be right to run the year differently.
What I would argue to anyone operating near a single campus is that the quiet months are the product. August is where the work becomes visible, and visibility is not the same thing as where the work happens.
Every August in Belmont looks like a sprint from the outside, and the week itself genuinely is one. What decided how it goes was settled in a quiet October, in a conversation nobody thought to write down, about a building that was not giving anyone trouble yet.
Richard Joseph Spinelli is the cofounder of Sandhills Real Estate, a student housing owner and operator in the Bronx. More at richardjosephspinelli.com.
Photos by Dina Badamshina and Rohit Choudhari on Unsplash
Sources
Fast Facts Back to School Statistics
Seasonality of Moves and The Duration and Tenure of Residence 1996
