Richard Joseph Spinelli

The work

Sandhills Real Estate, and how it is run

One neighbourhood, four jobs under one roof, and a standard written down for every apartment.

Richard Joseph Spinelli walking along a sidewalk beside a red brick building on a tree lined street, in a navy jacket and blue checked shirt

Richard Joseph Spinelli cofounded Sandhills Real Estate in 2020 and has worked out of Belmont ever since. The company holds and operates undergraduate housing close enough to reach the campus on foot in minutes, and it keeps all four jobs in house, the purchasing, the construction work, the letting and the day to day care, instead of parcelling them out to a manager, an agent and an absent owner.

What follows is each part of that, set out as the problem it answers, the part the company takes, and what exists now as a result. The same choices recur in his essays, where the argument traced across his essays starts from the map. The portfolio counts are a snapshot from the close of August 2026 and shift whenever another building closes.

Part by part

Five pieces of the same operation

  1. Buying inside one walk

    Problem
    A small owner spread across a borough cannot reach a building quickly, and everything downstream of that, showings, repairs, turns, is slower than it needs to be.
    Their part
    From 2022 Richard Joseph Spinelli pinned every acquisition to one small set of Belmont streets, on and around Belmont Avenue, Lorillard Place and Bathgate Avenue, rather than buying wherever a building happened to look cheap.
    Outcome
    Twenty seven units across thirteen assets, counted at the close of August 2026, none of them more than a few minutes from the gates or from one another.

  2. Renovating prewar stock

    Problem
    The housing on these blocks is prewar walk up stock, and its worth to a student group is set by how many rooms somebody can genuinely sleep in rather than by how the unit photographs.
    Their part
    The company buys, renovates and then holds, holding to a standard set down in writing for every apartment instead of to whatever a given set of trades would have done, and treating bedroom count as the decision the renovation is really making.
    Outcome
    Apartments and townhouses holding three, four or five bedrooms, let to a single group each, kept to one shared standard across the portfolio.

  3. Leasing to groups

    Problem
    Undergraduates near Rose Hill do not take units one by one. They assemble into a group, and that group has to hold together long enough to sign inside a window only a few weeks wide.
    Their part
    Sandhills shows what it owns under the student name it lets through, Live Off the Hill, instead of passing the job to an agent, so whoever answers a question also owns the building.
    Outcome
    A single pool of units, shown by the owner, to groups picking between addresses inside one small set of streets.

  4. Managing what it owns

    Problem
    Most of what a resident thinks of a landlord is decided by how long it takes somebody to turn up, and distance is the thing that makes turning up slow.
    Their part
    The company does its own management and keeps every callout within a few minutes of somebody able to attend, measuring itself by a resident first standard taken from within the apartment rather than from a report.
    Outcome
    More than one hundred residents housed, and the company reads its renewal rate as the test of whether that standard is genuine.

  5. The Fordham Athletics partnership

    Problem
    Student housing near any campus is an industry a university has reason to be careful about, and an operator has no standing in it by default.
    Their part
    Sandhills took the designation of Exclusive Off Campus Housing Partner of Fordham Athletics in August 2026.
    Outcome
    Through the 2026 to 2027 academic year, the first single sport jersey patch appears on the shirts of the baseball and men’s tennis teams.
Schematic map of Belmont in the Bronx Fordham University's Rose Hill campus sits along the north edge above East Fordham Road. Below it, running north to south from west to east, are Bathgate Avenue, Lorillard Place, Arthur Avenue, Hughes Avenue and Belmont Avenue. Sandhills Real Estate operates on and around Bathgate Avenue, Lorillard Place and Belmont Avenue, with Arthur Avenue, the heart of Little Italy, between them. Fordham University, Rose Hill campus E Fordham Rd E 189th St E 187th St E 186th St E 184th St Third Ave Bathgate Ave Lorillard Pl Hoffman St Arthur Ave Hughes Ave Belmont Ave Cambreleng Ave Crotona Ave Little Italy N
Streets where Sandhills operates Arthur Avenue, Little Italy Schematic, not to scale

Where

The blocks the portfolio sits on

Every building Richard Joseph Spinelli has bought since 2022 sits on or around three Belmont streets, Belmont Avenue, Lorillard Place and Bathgate Avenue, east of the campus itself. The schematic sets out how those streets sit against Arthur Avenue and against the campus itself.

Concentration this tight is a deliberate constraint rather than a stage the company is passing through. It sets a limit on how fast it can buy, and it is the reason a repair call and a showing can be answered on the same afternoon.

The essays go into the reasoning

What the company is not

It is not a manager of other people’s buildings, it does not operate outside this neighbourhood, and it does not use an outside agent to show its units. Each of those is a choice with a cost attached, and the cost is that the company grows slowly and is exposed to one market rather than several.

Its declared ambition is to own more housing for undergraduates on these streets than anybody else. That is a goal, and it appears here as one.

Sandhills Real Estate