Richard Joseph Spinelli owns and operates student housing in the Bronx. He cofounded Sandhills Real Estate in 2020 and has spent the years since building it around one campus and one neighborhood: Belmont, the blocks directly south of Fordham University's Rose Hill campus, where the company now owns thirteen properties with twenty seven units between them and houses more than a hundred students.
Boston College
His degree is a Bachelor of Science in Economics from Boston College, class of 2018. Today he runs a student housing company, and the economics training shows up in how he describes it: one market, studied closely, with the trades that come with concentration weighed rather than wished away.
Starting Sandhills Real Estate
Sandhills Real Estate was cofounded in 2020 to own and run off campus student housing. From 2022 onward its acquisitions concentrated on the streets around Rose Hill, and every building bought since then is within walking distance of the campus. The company buys older houses and apartment buildings, takes them through renovation, fills them with groups of students and keeps managing them itself, with purchasing, leasing and daily operations all handled in house.
The typical unit is a three, four or five bedroom apartment or townhouse, and the typical resident is a Fordham undergraduate signing with a group of friends, often on a first lease. Live Off the Hill, the firm's own student facing brand, handles the leasing and is the name students see.
Why one neighborhood
Belmont is the Bronx neighborhood most people know as Little Italy, with Arthur Avenue at its center. The Sandhills buildings sit on Lorillard Place, on Belmont Avenue and on Bathgate Avenue, close enough to one another that the person answering a repair call arrives on foot.
Spinelli treats that closeness as the operating model rather than a happy accident. One neighborhood means one leasing market and a single reputation among students who compare notes constantly, so the quality of a turn week or the speed of a fix becomes the marketing. It also means the whole portfolio depends on one university's calendar and one leasing season, a concentration of risk he accepted on purpose and does not pretend is free.
Resident first
The standard he holds the company to is resident first, meaning housing that stays ahead of what a student needs rather than reacting to it. In practice that is answered phones, every building inside one walk, and the same small team on the purchase, the renovation, the showing and the renewal. The people who run the company are not far in age from the students they house and still remember their own first apartment, which shapes how the company handles roommate questions, move in weekends and the calls that come at odd hours.
The Fordham relationship
Fordham Athletics made Sandhills Real Estate its Exclusive Off Campus Housing Partner on August 11, 2026, and Sandhills became the first sponsor to carry a sport specific jersey patch for Fordham Baseball and Fordham Men's Tennis. The patch appears on both programs' uniforms from the 2026 to 2027 academic year onward.
The partnership is the visible part of a relationship the company treats as neighborly obligation. Sandhills organizes networking events for the students, gives them notes on their resumes and shows up to speak when a student led club asks, and Spinelli describes those conversations as the part that matters most.
Off the clock
Tennis has been a constant. He plays, he follows the tour, and he has made it to the US Open close to twenty years running. One ambition is still open: every Grand Slam tournament, in person, inside the same twelve months.
The running started without much of a plan. He finished a 42 mile Last Man Standing race in Portland, Maine, a format that repeats one loop until runners drop out, having entered with no formal training and no previous race. He ran the 2024 Austin Marathon in 3 hours and 30 minutes.
He is a husband and a father, and he counts both as a bigger accomplishment than anything else on this page. Around the neighborhood he goes by Rich Spinelli.
What he writes about
His essays on Medium and Blogger stay close to the work: why one neighborhood beats a scattered map, what an old Bronx building asks of the person renovating it, how a group lease goes from showing to renewal, what a first time renter needs from a landlord, and what it takes to run a small company that does every job itself. The company keeps buying close to Rose Hill, and the goal it has set for itself is to be the largest owner and operator of off campus housing around Fordham.