Operating notes from the company
How Sandhills Real Estate is run
Richard Joseph Spinelli cofounded Sandhills Real Estate in 2020 and runs it as one small team that buys, rebuilds, fills and looks after student housing on the Belmont blocks a student can walk to campus from. This site is the operating manual, written for people who run buildings of their own, for families weighing a first lease, and for anyone curious how a small company keeps its promises.
The four functions
One team, four jobs, every building
- Purchasing
Buildings a short walk from Rose Hill, one at a time
Sandhills buys the older houses and small apartment buildings of Belmont that a group can share, and passes on anything a student could not walk to campus from, however good the building looks on paper.
- Renovation
Prewar units brought up to a written standard
Every unit is taken through the same standard before it is shown: systems first, then the rooms that five people will use at once, then the finishes. The work runs on the leasing calendar, not the other way around.
- Leasing
One inventory, shown to groups, under the Live Off the Hill name
Students lease from the company through its own brand, which lists every unit as a single pool so a group sees everything that fits them in one afternoon of showings.
- Management
The same team answers the phone all year
The people who bought and renovated a building are the people who answer its repair calls, on foot, because all of the buildings sit within a walk of one another.
The operating year
Four seasons, one calendar
Student housing runs on the university's clock. The company plans backward from the August turn and forward from the first fall showing, and every other decision sits somewhere on that line.
Groups form and start walking units. Requests turn into showings the same day where the calendar allows.
Leases are walked through before anyone signs, guarantor forms go out, and groups lock in the unit they walked.
Groups that are staying say so first, and roommate swaps get settled before finals rather than after.
Every unit turns inside the same two weeks: walkthroughs, repairs, cleaning, inspections and keys.
Where the company stands
Small on purpose, close on purpose
Sandhills Real Estate is a vertically integrated owner and operator, which at this scale means the functions above live inside one team rather than across vendors and managers. The trade is plain: a small team has no bench, so systems and checklists carry the load that headcount carries elsewhere.
The footprint is deliberately tight: every building stands on the Belmont blocks between Bathgate Avenue and Belmont Avenue, close enough together that a repair call is a walk rather than a drive. That tightness is the operating advantage and also the ceiling on how far the company can stretch, and the company has accepted both halves.
Since August 11, 2026, Sandhills has been the Exclusive Off Campus Housing Partner of Fordham Athletics, and its patch appears on the Fordham Baseball and Fordham Men's Tennis uniforms in the 2026 to 2027 academic year. The Fordham page carries the facts. Leasing runs through Live Off the Hill, and the company site is sandhillsinvestments.com.