Rent roll

What it means

A rent roll is a schedule of every unit you own, who occupies it, what they pay, and the terms under which they pay it — a single table describing the income the portfolio is contracted to produce.

It is a snapshot, not a history. Where the rent ledger records every charge and payment over time for one tenancy, the rent roll answers a different question: as of today, what does this portfolio look like?

A workable rent roll carries, per unit:

• Unit identifier and property
• Tenant name, or vacant
• Lease start and end dates
• Current monthly rent
• Security deposit held
• Balance owed, if any
• Lease type — fixed-term or month-to-month

Larger operators add market rent for comparison, concessions, and the date of the last increase. For a small portfolio, the seven fields above are enough to run on.

The name comes from the days when it was literally a roll of paper listing tenancies. The function has not changed: it is the document a lender, a buyer, an insurer or an accountant asks for first.

Why it matters

The rent roll is the only view that shows the portfolio as a whole, and almost every decision that matters is made at that level rather than unit by unit.

It answers the questions you cannot answer from individual leases without adding them up: what is contracted monthly income, how much of it is currently at risk, how many tenancies expire in the next 90 days, and how much deposit money you are holding on behalf of other people.

That last one is not trivial. On a four-unit portfolio at $2,400 each, you are holding around $9,600 that is not yours — see the commingling risk under operating account. A rent roll is where that liability is visible.

It is also the document that gets requested at the worst possible moment. Refinancing, insuring, or selling all begin with a rent roll, and one assembled hurriedly from memory and bank statements will contain errors that are then relied on. Buyers price off it; lenders size loans off it. An overstated rent roll is a problem that surfaces during due diligence, when your credibility on everything else is also being assessed.

For the canonical single property, the rent roll is one line — $2,400 a month, $28,800 a year, which is where every figure on Schedule E starts.

How it works in practice

Keep it as a derived view, never as a separate spreadsheet.

The core columns. For a small portfolio, one table:

Unit	Tenant	Term ends	Rent	Deposit	Balance
Oak St	Occupied	31 Mar	2,400.00	2,400.00	0.00
Pine Ave A	Occupied	30 Jun	1,800.00	1,800.00	120.00
Pine Ave B	Occupied	month-to-month	1,750.00	1,750.00	0.00
Elm Ct	Vacant since 14 Mar	—	—	—	—
Total contracted monthly			5,950.00	5,950.00	120.00

Read it for three things. Concentration — how much of the income depends on one tenancy. Expiry clustering — leases ending in the same month mean simultaneous turnovers, so stagger renewals where you can. Drift — units whose rent has not moved in two years while market rent has.

Distinguish scheduled from effective. The rent roll shows contracted rent. What actually arrives is lower by vacancy and arrears — the gap between the two is the vacancy rate and the delinquency rate, and both are computed from this table against the ledger.

Update it by not updating it. The rent roll should be generated from lease records rather than maintained by hand. Every manually maintained rent roll eventually disagrees with the leases, usually in the direction of the last rent increase somebody forgot to enter.

Common mistakes

• Keeping it as a separate spreadsheet. It drifts from the leases, and the drift is invisible until someone relies on it.
• Listing asking rent instead of contracted rent. A unit advertised at $2,500 and let at $2,400 is a $2,400 line.
• Omitting concessions. A month free on a twelve-month lease makes the effective rent $2,200, not $2,400, and a buyer will find it.
• Leaving deposits off. They are a liability and belong on the schedule.
• No expiry dates. Without them the rent roll cannot warn you about clustered turnovers.
• Counting a vacant unit at market rent. That is a projection, not a rent roll.

How BareBones PM helps

The rent roll is exactly the sort of document that should never be typed, because every field on it already exists somewhere else.

BareBones PM derives it from the lease records: unit, tenant, term dates, current rent, deposit held and outstanding balance all come from the same data the ledger and the deposit tracking use. There is no second copy to fall out of date.

Because rent changes are stored as dated events rather than overwritten values, the roll reflects the rent in force today while the history behind it stays readable.

Balances come from the ledger rather than being estimated, so the arrears column is the same figure you would put in a notice.

And because the underlying data is per-property, the same view aggregates to a portfolio or narrows to one property without maintaining two documents.

For how the underlying transaction history works, see The rent ledger.