A rent roll is a document that lists every tenant in a property alongside their unit, rent, lease start and end dates, and deposits. It is the primary evidence of a property's income, and one of the first documents a lender or buyer requests when underwriting a commercial real estate loan or sale.
The longer version
A rent roll is the income of a building told tenant by tenant. A standard rent roll lists, for every unit: the tenant name, the square footage or unit number, the current rent, the lease start and expiration dates, scheduled escalations, and the security deposit held. Read down the columns and you have the property's gross income; read across a row and you have the full standing of one lease. Those columns are also the template: any rent roll worth trusting carries the same fields, whether it lives in a spreadsheet or a property-management system.
The rent roll is prepared by the party that owns or manages the building, usually the landlord or the property manager, and it is only as current as the day it was pulled. That is why a buyer or lender treats the date on a rent roll as part of the data: a roll from three months ago describes a different building than one pulled last week if leases have turned over in between.
Underwriting starts at the rent roll, because debt service coverage is only as believable as the rent behind it. Lenders read the document for more than the total. Concentration risk, where one tenant carries the building, near-term rollover, where leases expire inside the loan term, and gaps between the rent roll and the operating statements are all underwriting questions that begin on this one page.
A rent roll is not an operating statement. The rent roll shows contractual rent, what tenants are supposed to pay. The operating statement shows what the building actually collected and spent. Lenders reconcile the two, and they confirm the rent roll itself against tenant estoppel certificates, which is how the numbers on the page get proven by the tenants named on it.
Because the rent roll changes as leases turn over, versions matter. Reconciling an older rent roll against the current one, and against the estoppels and operating statements, consumes real diligence time, and working from the wrong version is one of the quieter ways a closing goes sideways.
In Prodeal
The rent roll lands in the deal room against its checklist item, carries an explicit status instead of just a file name, and every version is kept with a time stamp, so the current one is never a matter of memory.
Common questions
- What is a rent roll?
- A rent roll is a document listing every tenant in a property with their unit, rent, lease dates, escalations, and deposits. It is the primary record of a property's rental income and the starting point for underwriting a commercial real estate loan or sale.
- What is included in a rent roll?
- A standard rent roll shows, for each unit: tenant name, unit or square footage, current rent, lease start and expiration, scheduled escalations, and the security deposit held. Together those columns give both the property's gross income and the standing of every individual lease.
- Who prepares the rent roll?
- The owner or property manager prepares it, since they hold the lease data. Because it changes every time a lease is signed or renewed, the date it was pulled matters as much as the numbers on it, and lenders ask for the most current version available.
- What is the difference between a rent roll and an operating statement?
- A rent roll shows contractual rent, what tenants are obligated to pay. An operating statement shows actual performance, what the building collected and spent over a period. Lenders read both and reconcile them, because the gap between the two is where underwriting questions live.
- Why do lenders ask for a rent roll?
- Because debt service coverage depends on the rent behind it. The rent roll is how a lender sizes a property's income, tests it for tenant concentration and near-term lease rollover, and sets the baseline they then verify against estoppel certificates and operating statements.