Rent Roll Analysis

Industrial rent rolls in the logistics belt around I-285 and I-20 tend to carry longer lease terms than office or retail, but escalation structures vary widely between older buildings with flat renewal options and newer speculative product with built-in annual bumps. A rent roll that looks strong on average rate can still hide one dominant tenant whose lease expires inside the exchanger's expected hold period.

We flag concentration risk specifically: what percentage of income depends on a single tenant, and what the building's re-leasing prospects look like if that tenant does not renew given current absorption along the corridor.

Midtown and Buckhead office rent rolls require a different read than industrial, since tenant improvement obligations, free rent periods already granted, and expense reimbursement structures affect true net income far more than the stated face rent. A rent roll showing full occupancy at a strong rate can still understate near-term rollover risk if several leases expire in the same eighteen-month window.

We build a rollover calendar for every office candidate so the exchanger can see, month by month, where re-leasing risk actually concentrates rather than relying on a trailing occupancy percentage alone.

Every rent roll goes through the same structured pass regardless of asset class.

• lease expiration dates plotted against the buyer's expected hold period
• escalation type and frequency for each tenant, rather than the blended average alone
• expense reimbursement structure and whether it matches the stated NNN or gross terms
• outstanding tenant improvement or free rent obligations not yet reflected in cash flow
• concentration risk from any tenant representing a large share of total income

A multifamily rent roll needs to be read against actual collections, rather than scheduled rent alone, since a unit showing full rent on paper but carrying six months of delinquency behaves very differently in underwriting than a unit paying on time. We reconcile the rent roll against the trailing collections report before treating in-place income as reliable.

Loss-to-lease gaps also matter more in a market like Atlanta where recent rent growth has been uneven across submarkets, and a rent roll with wide gaps between market rent and in-place rent tells a different story depending on whether that gap reflects upside opportunity or a landlord who has been reluctant to push renewals.

Exchangers who accept a rent roll at face value inside a compressed identification window sometimes find out after closing that a tenant they assumed would renew had already given informal notice, or that an escalation clause they assumed was annual was actually tied to an index that had gone flat. Catching that before identification is far cheaper than discovering it after the exchange has closed.

A rent roll summarizes what the leases say, but summaries drop nuance, and we pull the underlying lease documents for any tenant representing a meaningful share of income rather than trusting the spreadsheet's characterization of the terms. Renewal options with below-market fixed rates, early termination rights tied to a tenant's own performance triggers, and co-tenancy language buried in an anchor lease rarely make it into a summary rent roll at all.

This cross-check takes longer than reading the spreadsheet, but it is the step that catches the difference between a rent roll that looks clean and a rent roll that actually is clean once the underlying documents are read against it line by line.