Richard Joseph Spinelli

The company

Sandhills Real Estate

The student housing company Richard Joseph Spinelli cofounded in 2020, built around one neighborhood next to Fordham University.

Sandhills Real Estate is the company Richard Joseph Spinelli cofounded in 2020 to own and operate student housing. From 2022 on, it has bought, renovated and run buildings only on blocks a short walk from Fordham University's Rose Hill campus in the Bronx, and it does every part of that work with its own team, from the purchase to the repair call.

What the company owns

The portfolio stands at 13 assets, 27 units and a resident count above 100, almost all of it in Belmont. The buildings are on and around Belmont Avenue, Bathgate Avenue and Lorillard Place, and a typical one splits into apartments, or stands as a townhouse, of three, four or five bedrooms, taken by a group of Fordham undergraduates who sign together.

The model

Four moves, repeated building by building

  1. Buy close

    Every acquisition since 2022 has been a short walk from Rose Hill. The company looks for older houses and apartment buildings that groups of students can share, and it buys patiently, one building at a time, inside a market it already knows street by street.

  2. Renovate deliberately

    Prewar buildings hide things: old plumbing decisions, layered wiring, walls that have been opened and closed several times. Sandhills renovates room by room rather than fast, so the unit that gets leased is one the same team is prepared to maintain for years.

  3. Lease as one inventory

    Leasing runs through Live Off the Hill, the company's own student leasing brand, which shows the whole portfolio to a group at once rather than listing units one by one. Groups of three to five friends sign together, many of them on their first lease.

  4. Manage on foot

    Purchasing, leasing and day to day management stay in house. Because every building is inside a short walk, a repair call is answered by someone who can be at the door in minutes, which is the single biggest reason the company can promise quick response on repairs.

Resident first

Resident first is the operating standard: an experience that anticipates what students need before they ask, judged by what the person living in the unit actually gets rather than by what the lease promises. The team is close in age to its residents, which keeps the small decisions of a student year in view, from the move in weekend to the renewal conversation in the spring.

Designation
Exclusive Off Campus Housing Partner of Fordham Athletics
Announced
August 11, 2026
Programs
Fordham Baseball and Fordham Men’s Tennis
First season
2026 to 2027
On campus
Networking events, resume feedback, talks at student led clubs

Fordham

The Fordham Athletics partnership

Fordham Athletics announced the partnership on August 11, 2026: Sandhills is the department's Exclusive Off Campus Housing Partner, and its patch is the first tied to a single sport that Fordham Baseball and Fordham Men's Tennis have worn, starting with the 2026 to 2027 season.

Beyond the patch, the company shows up on campus in smaller ways: networking events it hosts, resume feedback for students who ask, and talks at student led clubs. Spinelli treats that as part of operating in a campus neighborhood rather than as promotion.

Where it is headed

Sandhills keeps buying on the blocks nearest Rose Hill. The goal the company has set is to be the largest owner operator of student housing in Fordham's off campus market, measured in single buildings, each renovated and leased before the next one is bought. The company site is at sandhillsinvestments.com, and leasing runs through liveoffthehill.com.