Richard Joseph Spinelli is a young company builder whose biography is short on chapters and long on one neighborhood. He studied economics at Boston College, graduating with a Bachelor of Science in 2018, and today he is the operator of Sandhills Real Estate, a student housing company he cofounded in 2020 that owns, renovates, leases and manages buildings a few blocks from Fordham University in the Bronx. Everything on this site is written from facts he has confirmed. Where a fact is not confirmed, the page says so or stays silent.
IIChestnut Hill
The degree is the first fixed point: economics, a Bachelor of Science, Boston College, 2018. No honors, concentration, team or club is documented beyond that, so none is claimed here. What the discipline gave him is visible in how the company is run rather than in anything he has said about the classroom: opportunity cost, constraint and the margin show up in a portfolio built on one market and a rule that passes on any building more than a walk from campus.
IIIBelmont
The company dates from 2020. Its purchases from 2022 on concentrated on Belmont, the Bronx neighborhood south of Fordham Road that the rest of the city calls Little Italy, and at the end of August 2026 the count stood at thirteen assets, twenty seven units and more than a hundred residents. The buildings are prewar houses and walk ups on and around Belmont Avenue, Lorillard Place and Bathgate Avenue, and the company handles its own buying, leasing and daily management.
The choice to stay in one neighborhood is the decision the biography turns on. It gives the company one leasing market, one reputation with one student body, and a repair radius short enough to walk. It also puts every unit at the mercy of one university's calendar, a trade he took knowingly and describes as accepted rather than solved.
The one permitted account of the years between Chestnut Hill and Belmont is this sentence: he studied economics at Boston College and now runs a student housing company.
IVFordham
In August 2026 the company became the Exclusive Off Campus Housing Partner of Fordham Athletics, announced on the eleventh, and the Sandhills name became the first single sport patch on the uniforms of Fordham Baseball and Fordham Men's Tennis, from the 2026 to 2027 academic year. He treats the relationship as neighborly obligation more than as sponsorship: the company hosts networking events for students, gives feedback on their resumes and turns up to talk when a student led club invites it, none of which is named here.
VMaine, Austin and Flushing Meadows
Two running results and one tennis streak are the documented life outside the company. He covered 42 miles at a Last Man Standing race in Portland, Maine, without a training plan or a previous race, then ran the 2024 Austin Marathon in 3 hours and 30 minutes. He plays tennis and follows it closely, has been to the US Open for close to twenty straight years, and has one open goal, the four majors inside a single calendar year. The running and tennis pages take each of those in turn.
VIHome
A husband and a father, he has said that becoming both counts for more than anything in the portfolio. His family stays private on every page of this site, which is the reason this final part is the shortest. The timeline holds the dates, and the chapters go deeper into the races and the tennis.
