How to read a rent roll.

What a rent roll is

A rent roll is a snapshot, as of one date, of every unit in the property: who lives there, what they pay, what they could pay at market, the lease term, and the unit’s status. Where the T-12 tells you what the property collected over the last year, the rent roll tells you what it’s contracted to collect right now — the run rate you’re actually buying. The two must agree; when they don’t, one is stale.

The columns that matter

• Unit and unit type. The mix — how many 1x1s, 2x2s, etc. Confirm the unit count matches the offering memorandum; a rent roll with fewer units than advertised is the first sign the numbers were assembled loosely.
• In-place (actual) rent. What the current lease charges. Sum it, annualize it, and you have the real top line before vacancy — not the GPR the OM leads with.
• Market rent. What management believes the unit would lease for today. Treat it as a claim to verify against comps, not a fact.
• Status. Occupied, vacant, notice, model, employee, down. The occupancy story lives here, not in a headline percentage.
• Lease start / end. The expiration ladder — how much of the rent roll rolls over, and when.
• Deposit, balance, concessions. Delinquency and giveaways hide here; a column of past-due balances is a collections problem the T-12 will confirm.

Loss to lease: the thesis in one number

The gap between market rent and in-place rent, summed across the property, is loss to lease — and on a value-add deal it’s the entire business plan. A property leasing 8% below market isn’t underperforming by accident; it’s a mark-to-market opportunity if the market rent is real, or a trap if it isn’t.

Occupancy: physical, economic, and the trap between

Physical occupancy is occupied units ÷ total units. Economic occupancy is rent actually collected ÷ gross potential rent — and it’s always the lower, more honest number, because it nets out concessions, delinquency, and non-revenue units. A property that’s 95% physically occupied but 86% economically occupied is telling you the leases on paper aren’t turning into cash. Underwrite the economic number.

Five rent-roll red flags

• 1. A wall of near-term expirations. If half the leases roll in the next two quarters, your “in-place” rent is really a bet on re-leasing velocity. Stagger risk matters.
• 2. Recent leases below in-place average. The newest signatures are the current market. If they’re under the rest of the roll, rents are falling, not rising — and the loss-to-lease “upside” is a mirage.
• 3. Concessions not shown. A roll with no concession column in a soft market is hiding free rent. Cross-check effective rent against the T-12’s net collections.
• 4. Model, employee, and down units counted as occupied. Non-revenue units inflate physical occupancy. Pull them out before computing anything.
• 5. Balances climbing. A growing past-due column is a deteriorating tenant base — it shows up in the rent roll a quarter before bad debt spikes in the statement.

Reconcile against the T-12

The rent roll’s annualized in-place rent, less vacancy and concessions, should land close to the T-12’s recent collected revenue. A meaningful gap means one document is out of date — or the better-looking one was handed over on purpose. This is the exact cross-check Nivora runs on upload: the rent roll and T-12 are reconciled against each other, and any mismatch is flagged before it reaches your model.

The 60-second pass

• Confirm unit count and mix against the OM.
• Annualize in-place rent — that’s your real top line, not GPR.
• Compute loss to lease, then verify market rent against the freshest signed leases.
• Use economic occupancy, and strip out model/employee/down units.
• Scan the expiration ladder and the balance column for rollover and delinquency risk.

Do that and the rent roll stops being a formality and becomes the place you find — or kill — the deal. Better: Nivora reads the rent roll, maps the columns, computes loss to lease and economic occupancy, and reconciles it against the T-12 the moment you upload.

Frequently asked questions