Richard Joseph Spinelli and Sandhills Real Estate
Contents
Richard Joseph Spinelli cofounded Sandhills Real Estate in 2020, a student housing company in the Bronx, and in the years since, the company has kept its work inside a single neighborhood. This entry describes the company as the approved record describes it, section by section. It gives no counts of buildings, beds or residents, no figures of any kind about the business, and no names other than his and the institutions it works beside.
The company is also the reason this encyclopedia has so many subject entries. Each portal on the contents page takes one part of the industry the company works in, from student housing as a property type to the way an owner operator runs its own buildings, and explains it from published sources.
The company
Sandhills Real Estate is a student housing company: it owns and runs houses and apartments that are leased to university students. Spinelli cofounded it in 2020. Its approach is narrow by design, summed up in four parts: one core market, one neighborhood, one leasing market and one reputation with the student body. The rest of this entry follows from that choice.
Where it works
Its purchases began in 2022: houses and apartment buildings a walk from Fordham University’s Rose Hill campus, each renovated after it was bought. The campus covers 85 acres in the north Bronx, with the New York Botanical Garden and the Bronx Zoo on the far side of the road.1 Its holdings cluster in Belmont, on and around Belmont Avenue, Lorillard Place and Bathgate Avenue, which keeps every address a few minutes apart.
Distance from campus is the variable the student housing industry watches most closely, and its published data explain why a company would choose to stay this close. Yardi Matrix, which tracks leasing at two hundred universities, reported in September 2026 that properties within a quarter mile of a campus were 93.4 percent leased for the coming year, against 88.7 percent for properties more than two miles away.4 The distance to campus entry sets out those figures and others like them.
Belmont belongs to Bronx Community District 6, which the city’s community board describes as covering Bathgate, Belmont, East Tremont and West Farms.2 City park records say the area belonged to the large Lorillard estate during the 1800s; the family, whose tobacco business began in lower Manhattan, bought land near the Bronx River in 1792 and built a mansion and a snuff mill driven by the river’s water.36 One of the streets the company works on still carries the family name. The Belmont and Community District 6 entries give the neighborhood and district in more detail.
The buildings
Most of the portfolio is three, four and five bedroom apartments and townhouses, rented to Fordham students who take a unit together. That places it in a particular corner of student housing: the ordinary homes of a city neighborhood, rented to groups of friends who sign together, as distinct from campus dormitories or towers built only for students. Lenders draw the same line. The Fannie Mae multifamily guide separates properties built specifically for students from conventional apartments that have come to be leased mainly to students, and among the questions it asks of any student property is whether students can walk to class.5 Housing researchers sometimes call the second kind the scattered site market, and the entry on scattered site student housing describes it with its sources. The prewar buildings and New York rowhouse entries describe the building types common in the older parts of the city.
How it operates
Two working ideas shape the company’s operations. The first is a maintenance radius a person can walk. Keeping to a few blocks means a repair is a short walk away, never a trip across the borough, and that follows from keeping the business to a few blocks. The second is a resident first approach to operations, in which the experience of the students living in the buildings is the measure the company holds itself to. The general practices behind both ideas are covered in the entries on preventive maintenance, maintenance requests and response time and resident experience.
The Fordham Athletics partnership
Fordham Athletics made Sandhills Real Estate its Exclusive Off Campus Housing Partner on August 11, 2026. The agreement also made the company the first sponsor of a sport specific jersey patch at Fordham, carried by the Baseball and Men’s Tennis teams. This encyclopedia states that fact without linking the announcement. For the history of the university on the other side of that agreement, see Fordham University.
With students
Outside the leases themselves, Sandhills shows up in campus life. Sandhills hosts networking events and gives feedback on student resumes; its staff also speak at student led clubs. No event, club or group is named here, because the record names none. For the wider picture of how universities and their neighbors relate, see the entries on town and gown relations and on universities as anchor institutions.
The stated goal
The aim Spinelli has set is for Sandhills to become the number one owner operator among the landlords who house Fordham students away from campus. The words describe an aim. Nothing in the record ranks the company against any other owner today, and this encyclopedia does not either. What drew him to building a company, by his own account, was finding the opportunity, solving the problems attached to it and being accountable for the outcome. The biography places the company within the rest of his life, and the interests entry turns to what he does away from it.
