Richard Joseph Spinelli
(He/Him)
Bronx
Covers:
Student housing, off campus rentals, Bronx and Fordham area real estate, small portfolio acquisitions and renovations, property operations, leasing and student resident experience.
Interview
Have you ever used a typewriter?
No. I graduated from Boston College in 2018, so the closest I have come is finding one in a Belmont townhouse we were renovating, in a closet, under about two decades of other people's belongings.
That is actually the part of this job people underestimate. These are hundred year old buildings in a neighborhood with a long memory. You buy one and you inherit whatever the last owner left in it, along with the plumbing decisions somebody made in 1974. The typewriter was the easy part.
How is social media changing news?
I can only speak to my corner of it. For our residents, the news about a building is not a listing or a review site, it is a group chat. Five juniors decide whether a place is worth signing based on what a friend said, and that reputation moves faster than anything we could publish about ourselves. It has made the operating side the marketing. If the maintenance response is slow, everyone knows by the weekend.
Who's your favorite fictional journalist?
Clark Kent, and not for the cape. He was a beat reporter who showed up, worked the story, and did the unglamorous part every day while everyone paid attention to the other thing. That is most of what running a small portfolio looks like. The interesting version is the acquisition. The actual job is the boiler, the lease renewal, the roommate dispute at eleven at night.
What does it mean to be a journalist?
I would not presume to define it, since I am not one. From the other side of it, as someone who occasionally gets asked questions, the reporters I respect do the same thing good operators do: they go look. They call the people actually living in the building instead of pulling a number off a listing site.
The version I see in my own world is small. If you want to know whether off campus housing near Rose Hill is working, you do not read a market report. You walk Belmont Avenue in September and ask five juniors what they pay, what broke, and how long it took someone to fix it. The answer is always more specific and less flattering than the summary.
So if it means anything from where I sit: showing up in person, and being willing to publish the unflattering specific.
What's the funniest news-related #hashtag you've seen?
#BrokeCollegeStudentProblems, which shows up every August when leases turn over. It is funny until you realize it is a real budget constraint for the people signing your leases. The other one I see constantly is #DormLife, usually posted by someone who has just discovered that a shared bathroom with forty people is not a lifestyle. That one is good for our business.
How do you prefer to be pitched on stories?
Email, and short. Tell me the story you are working on and the specific question you need answered, and I can usually tell you in two lines whether I am the right person or whether you want someone else.
I am a source, not a reporter, so the useful pitch to me is not a press release. It is a question. What are five juniors actually paying for a five bedroom near Rose Hill this year. What breaks when you renovate a hundred year old Belmont townhouse into student housing. Why does a landlord in this market show up at a resume workshop. Those I can answer with specifics, because I am in the buildings.
What I am not useful for is commentary on other owners, other markets, or anything I have not seen firsthand. I will say so rather than guess.
What tools and software do you use to do your job?
Less than people assume. A spreadsheet still does most of the underwriting. Beyond that it is a property management platform for leases and rent, a maintenance ticketing system so nothing lives in someone's text messages, and a shared calendar for turnover season, which is the only time of year the whole thing feels like logistics.
The tool that matters most is not software. It is proximity. Every building is within walking distance of Rose Hill, so the maintenance radius is walkable and someone can be at a unit in minutes. No platform replaces that.
On the leasing side, Instagram does more work than any listing service. Our student leasing brand, Live Off the Hill, runs there because that is where Fordham students actually look.
What's your favorite social network?
Instagram, by a wide margin, though not for personal use. It is where student housing leasing actually happens. Our leasing brand, Live Off the Hill, runs there because that is where Fordham students look for apartments and where they ask their friends whether a place is worth signing. A group of five juniors deciding on a five bedroom will make that call in a group chat, not on a listing site.
Who do you wish followed you?
Reporters covering New York housing and the Bronx specifically, and anyone at Fordham, students, parents and the athletics department. Those are the people this business actually answers to. Beyond that, other small owner operators. The off campus student housing market is full of two and three person companies figuring out the same problems independently, and there is not much written for them.
Why did you become a journalist?
I am not a journalist. I run a student housing company in the Bronx, and I ended up here because I wanted to be responsible for the outcome rather than advise on it.
What I do instead is help students. Most of our residents are signing their first lease, usually with three or four roommates and a parent as guarantor, and nobody has taught them how any of it works. So a lot of the job is explaining: what they are actually agreeing to, what happens if a roommate leaves, why the security deposit is what it is. Beyond the leases, we host networking events, review resumes, and speak at student led clubs. None of that is standard landlord practice. We do it because we are housing the same few hundred students year after year within a few blocks of Rose Hill, and the relationship outlasts the lease.
If reporters find me useful, it is on that: what off campus housing actually looks like from the operator side, in one neighborhood, at close range.
Did you work for your high school newspaper? If so, what did you do there?
No. I came at writing from the other direction, through the operating side of a business. These days most of what I write is for our residents and their parents, leases, renewal notices, move in guides, the occasional apology when a boiler goes out on a cold night. Writing clearly matters more in this business than people expect. If a 19 year old signing their first lease does not understand what they just agreed to, that is our failure, not theirs.
What story are you most proud of writing or working on?
Not a story, a project. Building Sandhills into the primary off campus housing option around Fordham's Rose Hill campus. The piece I am proudest of is the Fordham Athletics partnership announced on August 11, 2026, which named us the Exclusive Off Campus Housing Partner and the first sport specific jersey patch sponsor for Fordham Baseball and Men's Tennis. What matters more than the logo on the uniform is what sits behind it: more than 100 students housed, a maintenance radius you can walk, and a company that hosts networking events and reviews resumes for the same students who rent from us. That is not standard landlord practice, and it is the part we work hardest on.
What advice can you offer to aspiring journalists?
I would not give advice on a career I have not had. What I can offer is what I tell Fordham students when I sit down with their resumes, which is most of what I know about starting out in anything.
Be specific. A resume that says you are a hard worker says nothing. A resume that says you covered a beat for two years and can name what you learned from it says everything. The same is true of a pitch, a lease application, or a first conversation with someone whose time you are asking for.
And start before you feel ready. I ran 42 miles at a race in Maine having never trained for a marathon, entirely to find out whether I could. The thing I actually took from it was not the distance. It was that I was willing to begin without knowing how it ended. Most of the useful things I have done started that way.
When's the best time to pitch you?
Mornings, by email. I am usually walking the buildings or on a call by mid morning, and anything that lands in the afternoon tends to sit until the next day.
A note on timing that is specific to this business: August and January are the two months where I am least reachable. Those are turnover and move in windows, and everything else waits. May through July is when I have the most room for a real conversation, which is also when leasing decisions for the fall are getting made, so it is the most useful time to talk about the market anyway.
Keep it short. If it is relevant to off campus student housing, the Bronx, or the Fordham market, I will respond even if I cannot help, and I will point you to someone who can.
What's the best pitch you ever got?
The one that started the company. My partner made the case that the off campus market around Fordham was being served by owners who treated it as passive income, and that if you concentrated in a few blocks and actually ran the buildings well, you could own the market. No deck, no model, just a walk through Belmont and a specific observation about what was missing.
It worked because it was concrete. Not a thesis about student housing nationally, a claim about eleven blocks that either held up or did not. Every good pitch I have gotten since has that shape: a narrow claim you can go verify on foot.
What's the worst pitch you ever got?
Not a media pitch, a vendor pitch. Someone once tried to sell me a portfolio wide smart lock system, priced per door, on the argument that it would eliminate lockouts. In student housing, lockouts are not a technology problem. A junior loses a phone at two in the morning and the battery dies on the keypad and now you have a nineteen year old on a stoop on Belmont Avenue with no way in. The old answer, a spare key and someone who lives four blocks away, works better than the expensive one.
The general version: the worst pitches assume this business scales like software. It does not. It scales like a neighborhood. Anything that starts with per unit efficiency and never mentions the person living in the unit is going to be a bad fit for us.
What's your favorite drink?
Espresso, standing up, from one of the cafes on Arthur Avenue. It is a two minute walk from most of our buildings, which is the entire reason it became a habit. If I am walking to a unit anyway, I stop.
On a Sunday in September, iced coffee at the US Open. I have been going for close to twenty years now, and the ritual matters more than the drink.
When you're not at a computer, where are you most likely to be?
Walking Belmont. Between Belmont Avenue, Lorillard Place and Bathgate, most of what I need to see is within a few blocks, so a lot of the job happens on foot. Showing an apartment, checking a renovation, standing in a kitchen with four roommates working out who gets which room.
Otherwise, on a tennis court, or running. Both are the same thing for me, a way to keep score against yourself rather than anyone else.
And at home with my family, which is the part I would put first if the question let me.
Aside from your own, what's your favorite publication to read?
The Real Deal, for New York real estate. It covers the transaction side of the market closely, which is useful even when the deals are far larger than ours. I also read the Fordham Ram, the student paper. If you want to know what actually matters to the people living in your buildings, the campus paper tells you more than any market report.
What's the most common misperception about your beat?
That student housing is a passive, low touch business where you collect rent and hope for the best. It is the opposite. Our residents are 19 and 20 year olds signing their first lease, often with three or four roommates and a parent as guarantor, and they judge us on how fast a maintenance request gets handled, not on a pro forma. We keep everything within a few blocks of the Rose Hill campus so the maintenance radius is walkable, which is the whole point. The other misperception is that scale means spreading out. In this market, density in one neighborhood is what lets you actually deliver for the people living in the buildings.
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