What we look for in a rent roll

The document is a claim, not a record

A rent roll arrives as a spreadsheet, which makes it feel authoritative. It is better understood as a claim the seller is making about the property on a particular day. Every number in it was produced by someone with a view about what the asset is worth.

That is not a reason for suspicion. It is a reason to read the document as an argument, and to know which parts of the argument are load-bearing. Contract rent is verifiable. Occupancy on a single date is not the same as sustained occupancy. Concessions are often absent entirely.

Where the questions usually are

Lease expirations clustered in one quarter tell you something about the risk you are buying, and often about how the property was managed before it came to market. A roll where nearly every lease turns over in the same ninety days is a different asset than the average suggests.

Unit mix matters more than headline rent. Two properties with identical average rents can behave very differently if one concentrates its income in a handful of large units. The same is true of the gap between asking rent and rent actually being collected.

None of this requires a model. It requires reading the roll before the model reads it, so you know which assumptions you are about to lean on.