Knowing One Market Beats Scanning Twenty
The case against a narrow search is strong, and it still loses to what you learn walking the same blocks for years.
Every building we own sits within a few blocks of Fordham’s Rose Hill campus, on and around Belmont Avenue, Lorillard Place and Bathgate Avenue. The sharpest objection to running a company that way does not come from outside the business. It comes from other operators, and it deserves a straight answer.
I am Richard Joseph Spinelli, cofounder of Sandhills Real Estate. We have been buying and renovating student housing around Rose Hill since 2022, and today the firm owns 13 assets and 27 units that house more than 100 students, nearly all of them leased to groups of Fordham students.
This is for the operator deciding whether to plant a company in one submarket or to build a pipeline across several, and for the small landlord who keeps being told that a wide funnel is the only disciplined way to buy.
A wider search buys more options and worse information
Their case deserves full strength. An operator who screens twenty markets sees far more buildings in a year than I do, and volume is how a buyer learns what a fair price looks like. Comparison is a discipline of its own. If every building you consider sits on the same five blocks, you have no outside reference for any of them, and the ones you like start to look better than they are because you have walked past them for years.
A wide search also spreads risk. One university, one neighborhood, one student body. If off campus demand around Rose Hill shifted, every unit we own would feel it in the same leasing season, and no amount of local knowledge would soften that. I accept that exposure rather than argue it away.
There is a related blind spot I will own. A concentrated buyer has no clean way to know whether his own market has become expensive, because every comparison available to him is internal. I read what trades elsewhere, and reading is not the same as having stood in those buildings.
The objection goes further than risk. A narrow buyer can only say yes to what comes up nearby, which means patience and inactivity are hard to tell apart from the outside. Some years the right building does not trade at all, and an operator who refuses to leave the neighborhood has to sit still and call that discipline. I have argued before for why one neighborhood can carry a whole strategy, and this is the honest cost of that position: the pipeline is only as deep as the map.
So the disagreement is not about whether a wide search is serious work. The two approaches are buying different things. A wide search buys options. A narrow one buys information that is not available any other way.
The facts that decide a purchase are learned on foot
A set of listing materials carries square footage, bedroom count, taxes and photographs taken on the best morning of the year. It does not carry whether the joists under a soft floor are sound or spongy. It does not carry whether the riser serving four apartments has been patched so many times that the next repair is really a replacement. It does not carry how a cellar smells in August with the boiler off.
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It also does not carry the thing that decides more leases than any other in this business, which is which side of a block students actually want to live on. Groups choose by walk time, by who else is living on the street, and by whether the building looks like somewhere they can have an ordinary year. Two stretches of identical looking houses two hundred feet apart are not interchangeable to a group of five, and nothing in a file will tell you which one they sign for. We learn it from leasing, because leasing runs in house through Live Off the Hill, so the people who show units are the same people who later argue about what to buy.
The physical quirks are learned the same way. Where water goes on a street in a hard rain, which corners take it, and which cellars get checked first when it does. Which prewar houses on a block were clearly built by the same hand and therefore share the same weaknesses. When I look at a two family house now I find myself counting front doors before I count bedrooms, and I only know to do that because I have leased to enough groups to watch what happens when two households share one entry.
Turn week settles the rest. A building tells you what it is in the days between one group leaving and the next arriving, when every surface, every appliance and every door gets looked at under time pressure. Two houses that look alike in a photograph can be a full day apart in that work, and the difference compounds every August.
Here is the part another operator will dispute. A buyer screening twenty markets is screening on the wrong information. He is comparing numbers that are available to everyone, in places he has never walked after dark, and the facts that decide whether a student housing building works are not in the file at all. I would rather decline a hundred buildings on five blocks I know than bid once on a street I have only seen in photographs.
None of which means the structure stops mattering. It matters first, and what old housing stock rewards is patience with exactly that, long before anyone gets to a view about a block.
Buying by the map is the version of this I keep returning to, because the question underneath it is which facts a buyer is entitled to use.
Local knowledge does not travel and that is the price
The trade here is real and it is not small. Almost everything described above lives in the people who walk these blocks, and almost none of it is written down anywhere. It does not transfer. If we bought three miles from here tomorrow we would be beginners again, without the leasing history and without the physical memory, and we would make mistakes we have already paid for in Belmont.
So the moat is also a fence. Our stated goal is to become the largest owner operator in Fordham’s off campus housing market, and the ceiling on how fast that happens is set by how quickly this knowledge can be taught to another person, one building at a time. A wider operator can hire a manager and be working in a new city inside a season. We cannot, and we have stopped pretending we can. We have traded reach for certainty, and that price only makes sense while the market stays worth being certain about.
There is a second cost, quieter than the first. A narrow buyer gets attached. The house you have walked past for four years is the house you will talk yourself into, and the only protection is a rule set before you want the building rather than after, which is that the roof and the cellar decide and everything else waits its turn.
Twenty markets would hand me more buildings to look at. The markets I will never look at are the reason I can answer a question about this one without picking up the phone.
Richard Joseph Spinelli is the cofounder of Sandhills Real Estate, a student housing owner and operator in the Bronx. More at richardjosephspinelli.com.
