Rent roll: the one document a lender, buyer or appraiser asks for first

A rent roll is the schedule of every tenancy in a property or portfolio: who occupies what, on what terms, paying how much, until when. It is produced as at a date, and it is the first document requested in a financing, a sale, an appraisal or an insurance renewal — because it converts a building into an income statement.

Owners tend to treat it as an internal report and produce it casually. The readers do not read it casually. A lender is looking at expiry concentration, an appraiser at rent versus market, a buyer at arrears and at how many tenancies are month-to-month. A rent roll that omits those columns invites the questions it should have answered.

What belongs on a rent roll

• Unit or suite identifier, and rentable area.
• Tenant legal name, not the trading name on the door.
• Lease start, expiry, and any options with their notice deadlines.
• Current base rent, and the rent per unit of area so the reader can compare.
• Scheduled escalations and their dates.
• Recoveries: how operating expenses are charged — net, gross, base year.
• Security deposits and guarantees held.
• Arrears as at the report date, aged.
• Vacancy, with the space shown rather than omitted.
• The as-at date, on the report itself.

It has to tie to the leases

The fastest way to lose credibility in a transaction is a rent roll that disagrees with the lease abstracts during diligence — a rent that was escalated in the system but not under the lease, an expiry that ignores an exercised option, a deposit recorded but never received. Buyers price uncertainty, and a document that has to be corrected mid-process shifts the negotiation. Reconciling the roll to the actual leases once, properly, is cheaper than the discount that follows.

Show vacancy explicitly. A rent roll listing only occupied units and a separate statement of occupancy invites the reader to assume the worst about what is missing, and they will find it anyway from the area totals.

Expiries are what the reader is really assessing

A portfolio with half its income expiring in the same eighteen months is a different asset from one with staggered terms, regardless of current income. Producing the roll with a term expiry profile — how much income rolls in each of the next five years — answers the question a lender or buyer is going to ask anyway, and it is the view an owner should be running internally in any case.

Keeping it current

The rent roll is only as good as the lease data behind it, which changes constantly: renewals, assignments, options exercised, deposits returned. Ettex Records holds the lease file per tenancy with the key dates, Ettex Sheets carries the roll itself with the expiry profile calculated rather than typed, and the annual charge reconciliation built on the same tenant schedule is covered in cam reconciliation.

Plainly: this is records and spreadsheets, not property management software, and none of it is valuation or legal advice. For a portfolio of any size a dedicated system holds the lease data; what this covers is the document and the discipline of tying it to the leases.