Rent Roll Template: What a Commercial Rent Roll Includes and How to Analyze One

What a rent roll is

A rent roll is a table listing every lease in a property: the tenant, the space they occupy, the rent they pay and the dates their lease runs. One row per lease. A totals row at the bottom.

Owners keep one to track income. Lenders ask for one to size a loan. Buyers read one to work out whether the income the seller is quoting will still be there in 18 months.

If you own a duplex, your rent roll is 2 rows and you can keep it in your head. If you are underwriting a 54,000 SF office building with 10 tenants, 1 vacancy and leases expiring in 6 different years, the rent roll is the spreadsheet that tells you what you are buying. The rest of this post is written for that second reader, who usually sees a summary of the rent roll in the offering memorandum first.

What columns a commercial rent roll needs

A residential rent roll gets by with unit, tenant, rent and lease dates. A commercial rent roll needs more, because every lease is negotiated separately and the differences are where the money is.

The columns, in the order we'd lay them out:

1. Suite or unit. The identifier the leases use. Match it to the stacking plan.
2. Tenant. Legal entity name as on the lease, trade name in brackets if different.
3. Rentable SF (or unit type for multifamily). The number rent is charged on.
4. Lease start. Commencement date, often months after signing.
5. Lease end. Expiration of the current term, ignoring options.
6. Term remaining. Years from your as-of date to lease end. A formula, so it updates.
7. Monthly base rent. Current contract rent, before recoveries.
8. Annual base rent. Monthly times 12.
9. Rent per SF. Annual base rent divided by RSF. The column that makes tenants comparable.
10. Escalations. Fixed percentage, fixed dollar step, CPI, or flat. Say which and how often.
11. Recovery type. NNN, modified gross, full service or gross. This decides who pays taxes, insurance and operating costs, and it changes what "rent per SF" means from one row to the next.
12. Security deposit. Cash or letter of credit, and the amount.
13. Options. Renewal, expansion, termination, right of first refusal. Each one changes the rollover picture.
14. Notes. Free rent, abatements, co-tenancy clauses, holdovers, TI still owed. The most important column on the sheet and the one most often left blank.

Broker rent rolls routinely drop escalations, recovery type and options. When they do, the OM's stated NOI can't be checked, and checking it is the point of a rent roll.

The template

The download is a 3-sheet Excel workbook.

Sheet 1 is the rent roll: one row per lease, the 14 columns above, and a totals row that sums RSF, monthly rent and annual rent. Term remaining, annual rent and rent per SF are formulas. Recovery type is a dropdown so the values stay consistent.

Sheet 2 is a summary block that reads off the first. It computes occupancy (occupied RSF over total RSF), WALT weighted by annual rent, in-place rent per occupied SF, and a rollover table by calendar year showing RSF expiring, the share of occupied RSF, and the rent attached to it. It also lists the top 3 tenants by share of rent.

Sheet 3 is the worked example from further down this page, so you can see a filled-in version before you type over it.

How to analyze a rent roll

Once the rows are in, the analysis is 8 questions. Most take under a minute each.

Occupancy and vacancy. Occupied RSF divided by total RSF. Then ask whether the vacant space is leasable as-is or needs a buildout, because the OM will usually assume it leases at market in month 6.

WALT. Weighted average lease term, weighted by annual rent (some people weight by SF; rent tells you how much income is at risk). A WALT under 3 years on a multi-tenant building means you are buying a leasing project, whatever the OM calls it.

Rollover by year. Group expirations by calendar year and total the RSF and rent in each. Two or three large leases expiring in the same year is the most common thing a rent roll reveals that an OM summary hides.

Tenant concentration. Share of annual rent from the largest tenant, and from the top 3. Above about 20% from one tenant, their credit and renewal intentions become the underwriting.

Below-market rents and mark-to-market. Compare each row's rent per SF to your view of market for that space type. Rows well below market are upside at rollover. Rows well above market are rent you will lose. On an apartment rent roll, the same gap added up across all units is called loss to lease.

Free rent and abatements. These live in the notes column, if anywhere. A tenant with 2 months free every year pays 10 months of the figure in the annual rent column. Adjust before you take the total into the model.

Month-to-month tenants. Any row whose lease end is in the past is a holdover. Count that space as rolling now, at whatever rent the tenant will accept to stay.

Tie-out to the T12. Total contract rent, adjusted for free rent and for leases that commenced mid-year, should reconcile to rental income on the trailing 12 months. If it doesn't, find out why before you believe either document. Together, the two documents are the first step in our guide on how to underwrite a commercial real estate deal. Our T12 post covers the other side of that reconciliation.

Red flags

Some problems show up before any analysis, from the way the rent roll is put together.

• Totals that don't foot. Add the annual rent column yourself. If it differs from the stated total, the sheet has been edited by hand.
• Missing lease dates. A row with a tenant and a rent but no dates is a row you can't underwrite. Ask for the lease.
• Rents rounded to the nearest hundred. Real contract rents, after escalations, have odd cents. Round numbers mean someone typed in an estimate.
• Tenants with no lease on file. If the seller can't produce the lease, treat the row as vacant until they can.
• "Proposed" or "LOI" tenants counted as in place. A letter of intent is a conversation. Strip these rows out of occupancy and rent totals and put them back only as a lease-up assumption you have chosen.
• A rent roll dated months before the OM. Tenants may have left, renewed or defaulted since. Ask for one dated within 30 days.

A worked example

In the Rent Roll template sheet 3, there is a worked example of the rent roll for a 54,000 RSF suburban office building, 11 suites, as of 1 October 2026. Market rent for comparable space in this submarket is taken as $25.50 per SF, modified gross, for the analysis that follows.

The summary block reads:

• Occupancy: 52,200 of 54,000 RSF, or 96.7%. Vacancy 1,800 RSF.
• In-place rent: $1,325,150 contract rent, $25.39 per occupied SF.
• WALT (weighted by rent): 3.1 years.
• Rollover: 2026, 5,600 RSF (10.7% of occupied space, the holdover). 2027, 10,100 RSF (19.3%). 2028, 4,200 RSF (8.0%). 2029, 5,600 RSF (10.7%). 2030, 7,200 RSF (13.8%). 2031, 15,100 RSF (28.9%). 2032, 4,400 RSF (8.4%).
• Concentration: Northgate Engineering is 19.6% of rent. The top 3 tenants (Northgate, Summit, Meridian) are 44.7%.

What that tells you. Occupancy looks fine on the cover page, but 19,900 RSF, 38% of the leased space, expires within 24 months once you count the Cole & Varga holdover and the Brightline expiry in August 2028. The building is a leasing job dressed as a stabilized asset.

Meridian at $23.00 flat is $2.50 under market, which is $16,250 a year of mark-to-market upside at the end of 2027, if they renew at market or the space re-leases. Cole & Varga at $24.00 on a holdover is $8,400 under.

The notes column changes the income. Summit's 2 free months a year through 2027 means they pay $153,000 a year against the $183,600 in the annual column. Redwood's rent commenced in July 2026, so a T12 ending September 2026 shows only 3 months of their $12,146. Contract rent of $1,325,150 will reconcile to a materially lower collected figure in the T12, and both numbers are right. The model needs to know which one it is using.

Where Altrio fits

When a broker emails an OM with a rent roll attached, Altrio extracts the data from both, including every lease on the rent roll: suite, tenant, SF, lease dates and rent. Altrio extracts the T12 as well, so tying contract rent to collected rent doesn’t mean retyping either document. More on our data extraction page, and on reading the T12 in what is a T12 in real estate.

Underwriting a deal this week? Altrio reads the rent roll out of the broker's email and files every lease for you. Start free