How do you read a rent roll?

A snapshot, not a history

A rent roll is a single-date export from the property management system: what every unit is leased for, to whom, and under what terms, as of the day it was pulled. It says nothing about how reliably that rent has actually been collected. That history lives in the T-12, and the two documents only become trustworthy once you check one against the other, the subject of the second half of this page. If a seller's package leans on a forward-looking rent projection instead of either document, that comparison is covered separately in T-12 vs. proforma.

Every example below uses the same 24-unit property carried through the rest of this cluster: $1,400 average in-place rent, a rent roll that schedules $403,200 a year, and a T-12 that collected $358,500 of it.

The columns, one at a time

Rent rolls vary by property management software, but the columns that matter are consistent. Here is what each one tells you, and what to check. If you are building a rent roll rather than reading one, start from the free multifamily rent roll template, which carries these same columns and the reconciliation worksheet that ties them to the T-12.

• Unit number: identifies the physical unit. Count the rows and confirm the total matches the property's advertised unit count, with no duplicates and no gaps that would mean units are missing from the export.
• Unit type / floor plan: bed and bath count, and often a square footage code. Confirm it matches the unit mix used to build the market rent column, or you will end up comparing a two-bedroom's in-place rent against a one-bedroom's market comp.
• Tenant name: who occupies the unit, or a marker such as "VACANT." Watch for repeated surnames across units, which can indicate a buddy lease arrangement, and for blank names on rows marked occupied.
• Lease start date: when the current lease began. A cluster of identical or near-identical start dates across many units suggests a recent portfolio-wide re-lease push, which is exactly what step three below tests for.
• Lease end date: when the current lease expires. A wall of leases expiring in the same month or two is renewal risk concentrated in a single window, not spread across the year.
• Market rent: what the unit would achieve if leased today, at current asking rates. Check it is set consistently unit-type by unit-type, not inflated to flatter the loss-to-lease story.
• Actual / in-place rent: what the current tenant is contracted to pay. The gap between this and market rent is loss-to-lease, addressed below.
• Security deposit: usually a fraction of a month's rent. A deposit far below the norm for that unit type can flag a concession or a legacy under-market lease that was never brought current.
• Balance / delinquency: what the tenant currently owes, as a running total rather than this month's shortfall. A tenant can be current this month and still carry an old balance, so a large or growing figure here is a prompt to pull the delinquency aging report and see whether the debt is being paid down or compounding.
• Status: occupied, vacant, down or model, or on notice to vacate. Check the mix of these against the physical occupancy the seller's package claims, and against the economic occupancy check in step three below.

A handful of rows from this property's rent roll, to see the pattern in practice:

Three of these six rows carry a flag: unit 103 is occupied but paying well under market, unit 105 is occupied but not current on its balance, and unit 106 is offline for renovation rather than simply empty. None of that is visible from a status column alone; you have to read every row across, not just down.

Four checks that tie a rent roll to the T-12

The rent roll and the T-12 describe the same property from two different angles: one is a snapshot of leases, the other is a year of actual cash. They rarely match exactly, and the checks below are how you find out why.

• Annualized in-place rent versus T-12 collected rent. Multiply the rent roll's total monthly in-place rent by twelve and compare it against the T-12's collected rental income for the year. The difference is the collection gap, and it blends vacancy, concessions, delinquency, and any rent increases that happened partway through the year.
• Loss-to-lease: market rent versus in-place rent. Sum the gap between what each unit could rent for today and what it is actually contracted to pay. A large total usually means rents were raised recently and the leases signed before the increase have not yet turned over, which is a timing story, not a collections problem.
• Vacant and down units: physical versus economic occupancy. Physical occupancy counts whether a unit has a tenant in it. Economic occupancy is a property-level ratio: collected income as a share of the property's potential rent. A building can report 95 percent physical occupancy and collect meaningfully less than 95 percent of its potential rent once concessions, delinquency, and down units are counted.
• Concessions and delinquency. An occupied unit can produce zero income if the tenant received a free month, is behind on payment, or both. The rent roll's balance column is the first place to look; the T-12's collected total is where that shortfall actually lands.

Worked example: reconciling a 24-unit rent roll

Run the first check on this property. The rent roll schedules 24 units at an average in-place rent of $1,400, and the T-12 collected less than that annualized figure:

An 11.1 percent gap is above the roughly 8 to 10 percent line that deserves a line-item decomposition rather than a shrug. Asking the seller for the rent roll's vacancy log, concession ledger, and aging report turns the single number into four:

That last line connects to a second pattern worth checking whenever a gap this size shows up: was there a recent rent push? Here, the trailing three months averaged $32,500 in collected rent against $29,000 for the prior nine months, a 12.1 percent lift. That recent increase explains why a chunk of the year's collections sit below today's $1,400 average in-place rent: most of the months in the T-12 predate the higher rents the current rent roll reflects. A lift this size and this recent is not proof of anything on its own, but it is exactly the kind of pattern that needs lease-level evidence, not just a rent roll total, before you underwrite it as durable.

One more line worth checking while you have both documents open: this property's other income totals $31,500 on the T-12, but $12,000 of that is a one-time insurance claim booked mid-year. The rent roll will not show that; only the T-12's monthly detail does. Full treatment of that kind of one-time item, and the rest of the normalization workflow, is covered in how to analyze a T-12.

How RTOM checks this

RTOM runs a set of detectors on every T-12 before a listing can go active. They work inside the statement itself, and several of them catch the exact patterns this rent roll reconciliation is built to find:

• Pre-list rent lift. A trailing three month effective rent more than 10 percent above the prior nine month average is a critical flag that blocks publish until the seller writes a disclosure. The 12.1 percent lift in this example would trigger it.
• Revenue dip. Two or more months of effective rent at least 10 percent below the trailing median are flagged.
• Occupancy decline. Economic occupancy falling for three consecutive months is flagged.
• Other income concentration. Other income at 5 percent or more of total income without an itemized breakdown is flagged, which is exactly why the $12,000 insurance claim above needs to be called out by name rather than folded into a single "other income" line.
• Reconciling the rent roll to the T-12 stays buyer diligence. RTOM's detectors verify what is inside the statement; matching the current rent roll against a year of collections, unit by unit, is work a buyer should still do on any deal, anywhere.