A rent roll is only worth what its source documents say. Upload the leases and amendments and get every rent roll field rebuilt from the lease language itself, each cell citing the page it came from, so the roll you hand a lender ties to the documents behind it.
Upload a document to extract
Drop files here or click to upload
Up to 50 files
Uploading...
Almost every bad rent roll is bad in the same seven places. The pattern is consistent: the number on the roll was copied forward from an earlier roll instead of being read out of the lease as amended. Each row below names the field, says where the correct number actually lives, describes how it goes wrong, and states what happens downstream when a lender or a buyer catches it.
| Rent roll field | Where the correct number actually lives | How it gets misstated | What it costs downstream |
|---|---|---|---|
| Leased square footage | The premises definition in the lease, plus any remeasurement or expansion amendment that restated it | The roll carries the marketing square footage, or the pre-expansion number, because nobody re-read the third amendment | Every per square foot metric is wrong, and so is the pro rata share denominator used to bill CAM to every other tenant in the building |
| Current base rent | The rent schedule escalated to today, not the rent printed near the signature page | The roll shows year one rent three years into the term, or misses a mid-year escalation that fell between reporting periods | Net operating income is misstated. The lender re-underwrites at the lower number and the loan proceeds move with it |
| Lease expiration date | The commencement date agreement, which fixes the real start, plus every amendment that extended the term | The roll uses the estimated commencement date printed in the original lease, so the expiration is off by however long delivery slipped | The rollover schedule and the weighted average lease term are both wrong, and a lender is underwriting term the property does not have |
| Renewal options | The option article, together with the notice window that governs whether the option can still be exercised | The roll shows one five year option with no notice deadline attached to it | An option lapses unexercised because nobody tracked the window, or a buyer pays for extension term the tenant can no longer reach |
| Security deposit and letter of credit | The deposit article, plus any burn-down schedule and any draw the landlord already made | The roll still shows the original deposit after a burn-down provision reduced it, or shows a letter of credit that expired | Credit support is overstated. At closing the buyer is credited for a deposit balance that is not actually there |
| Expense recovery structure | The operating expense article of each individual lease: triple net, base year stop, or full service gross | The roll flattens a mixed building to a single label, usually NNN, because the roll has one column for it | Recoverable income is projected off a structure that does not exist, and the first CAM reconciliation after closing produces a dispute |
| Free rent and remaining concessions | The abatement schedule in the lease and in any amendment that granted further free rent | Concessions are omitted entirely because the roll reports in-place rent and abatement is not an in-place rent event | Trailing collections never tie to the roll. Diligence stalls while the buyer works out why cash receipts sit below contractual rent |
Rebuilding a rent roll from source documents is a different job from formatting one. These are the fields that decide whether the roll survives diligence.
Suite or unit, tenant legal name, leased square footage, lease commencement and expiration, current base rent, rent per square foot, and occupancy status, pulled from the lease and its amendments rather than carried forward from the last roll.
The full rent schedule with every step, so the current rent shown is the rent actually in effect on the as-of date, not the rent that was in effect when the lease was signed.
Renewal, expansion, contraction, termination, and purchase options, each with the exercise window and the notice deadline that governs it, so an option on the roll is a right somebody can still act on.
Security deposit amount and form, letter of credit expiration, any burn-down schedule, and whether a guaranty backs the lease, including any cap or burn-off on the guaranty itself.
Whether each tenant sits on a triple net, modified gross, base year, or full service gross structure, with the pro rata share and any cap, because a mixed building does not have one answer.
Excel, CSV, and JSON, plus an API, so the roll lands in your underwriting model, in Yardi or MRI, or in the agency template your lender asked for, without a retyping step.
From a folder of leases and amendments to a rent roll whose every cell cites the document it came from.
Include the original lease, all amendments, any assignment or sublease, the commencement date agreement, guaranties, and any estoppel certificates already collected. Scans are fine. The commencement date agreement matters more than people expect, because it fixes the real term.
The model resolves the amendment chain to current state, escalates the rent schedule to your as-of date, and returns tenant, suite, square footage, term, current rent, options with notice windows, deposits, and recovery structure as structured fields.
Every field links to the page and clause it came from. The output flags conflicts: a rent schedule that disagrees with an amendment, an option with no notice window, an expiration that moved after the commencement date agreement. Review time goes there.
Push to Excel, CSV, JSON, or the API. Because every cell carries a source citation, the person signing the certification can actually check the assertion they are being asked to make.
Last updated July 2026. What rent roll abstraction is, what a certified rent roll actually certifies, which fields a lender checks, and why the roll so often disagrees with the leases behind it.
Rent roll abstraction is the practice of building a rent roll directly from the underlying leases and amendments rather than copying forward an existing spreadsheet. Each field on the roll, the tenant name, the leased square footage, the current rent, the expiration, the options, the deposit, is read out of the lease as amended and carries a citation back to the page it came from. The output is a rent roll somebody can defend, line by line, against the documents behind it.
The distinction matters because most rent rolls are maintained, not built. A number enters the roll once and then survives every subsequent update by inertia. Abstraction resets the roll against the source documents. If you are new to the format itself, the explainer on what a rent roll is covers what the report contains and who uses it, and how to read a rent roll walks the columns one at a time. The step by step method is on how to build a rent roll from leases.
A certified rent roll is a rent roll accompanied by a written statement in which the owner, borrower, or an authorized property manager attests that the attached roll is current, true, correct, and complete to the best of the signer's knowledge. The certification is a representation, not an audit. It shifts responsibility for the numbers onto the person who signed it, which is exactly why lenders ask for one.
The data is usually identical. The difference is the signature. An ordinary rent roll is a management report. A certified rent roll adds a signed attestation of accuracy and completeness, so a lender or buyer relying on it has a party to look to if the roll turns out to be wrong. Nothing about certification makes the numbers more accurate. It only makes them someone's problem.
That is the practical argument for abstracting the roll from source documents before certifying it. Signing an attestation about a spreadsheet nobody has reconciled to the leases in three years is a risk most asset managers have simply stopped thinking about.
At minimum: the unit or suite identifier, leased square footage, tenant name, current rent, and lease expiration date. Commercial lenders generally want more, including lease commencement, rent per square foot, escalation schedule, renewal options, security deposit, expense recovery structure, and occupancy status. Agency multifamily lenders go further and prescribe the format outright.
Fannie Mae publishes a multifamily rent roll template that is the required format for loan delivery, and its fields are aligned to the C-MISMO data standards the commercial mortgage-backed securities industry uses. That template is a useful benchmark even for deals that will never touch agency debt, because it reflects what an institutional buyer of the loan expects to see. Lenders also routinely pull the underlying leases for tenants representing a meaningful share of property income, then check those leases against the roll. Our page on lease abstraction for lenders covers the underwriting side of the same problem.
Collect the complete document set for each space, resolve every amendment to current state, escalate the rent schedule to your as-of date, then populate the roll field by field with a citation to the governing clause. The sequence matters. Resolving amendments before reading rent prevents the single most common error, which is reporting an original rent that three amendments have since replaced.
The complete document set is where teams cut corners. It means the lease, every amendment, the commencement date agreement, any assignment or sublease, the guaranty, and any side letter. A side letter that waives a CAM charge does not appear in the lease and will not appear on the roll unless somebody reads it. Doing this across a portfolio by hand is what bulk lease upload exists for, and the field list is on the commercial lease abstract template.
Because the roll is updated by exception and the leases are not. Rent steps get entered when someone remembers. Expansion amendments change square footage without changing the roll. A commencement date agreement moves the expiration by four months and nobody restates the term. Over a few years the roll drifts from the documents in ways that are individually small and collectively material.
Three drift sources account for most of it. Escalations that fall between reporting cycles. Amendments that restate square footage or term. And concessions, which never appear on an in-place rent roll at all because free rent is the absence of a rent event. Reconciling the roll to the leases is the only way to find them, and it is the reason buyers pull estoppel certificates from every tenant before closing rather than trusting the seller's roll.
Monthly for reporting, and rebuilt from source documents whenever the property is being financed, sold, or contributed to a fund. A monthly roll keeps occupancy and collections current. It does not catch a mis-abstracted expiration date, because that error is stable and reproduces itself every month. Those are two different jobs and only one of them is routine.
A rent roll is one row per space showing current economics across the whole property. A lease abstract is several pages on a single lease, covering the provisions a rent roll has no column for: assignment consent standards, exclusive use rights, co-tenancy triggers, restoration obligations, notice mechanics. The roll answers what the property earns today. The abstract answers what the property is contractually obligated to do. Most institutional owners maintain both, and the roll should be generated from the abstracts.
Yes, and the portfolio case is where it pays. The model reads each lease with its amendments, resolves the chain to current state, escalates rent to the as-of date, and returns the rent roll fields with a source citation per cell. On a 400 lease portfolio it flags the 40 that deviate from the standard form so reviewers read those instead of all 400.
Accuracy depends on scan quality, and every published accuracy figure in this category is self-reported, so test on your own worst-scanned lease file before you trust it on the portfolio. The general product overview is on lease abstraction software. Where the roll feeds a valuation or a hold-sell decision, lease abstraction for asset managers covers the portfolio workflow, and the notice deadlines the roll surfaces are handled on critical date extraction. If the recovery structure column is the part you distrust, start with operating expense statement abstraction.
Building a rent roll directly from the underlying leases and amendments rather than copying an existing spreadsheet forward. Each field is read out of the lease as amended and cites the page it came from, so the roll can be defended line by line against its source documents.
A rent roll accompanied by a signed statement in which the owner, borrower, or authorized property manager attests that it is current, true, correct, and complete to the best of their knowledge. It is a representation rather than an audit, which is why lenders require it.
Only the signature. The data is typically the same. Certification adds a signed attestation of accuracy, giving a lender or buyer a party to look to if the roll proves wrong. It makes the numbers someone's responsibility, not more accurate.
At minimum the unit identifier, leased square footage, tenant name, current rent, and lease expiration. Commercial lenders also expect commencement date, rent per square foot, escalations, renewal options, security deposit, and expense recovery structure. Agency multifamily lenders prescribe the template.
Because the roll is updated by exception while the leases are not. Escalations fall between reporting cycles, amendments restate square footage or term, and concessions never appear on an in-place roll at all. The drift is individually small and collectively material.
Monthly for reporting, and rebuilt from source documents whenever the property is financed, sold, or contributed to a fund. A monthly update keeps occupancy current but will never catch a mis-abstracted expiration date, because that error reproduces itself every month.
Yes. The model resolves each amendment chain to current state, escalates rent to your as-of date, and returns the rent roll fields with a citation per cell. On a large portfolio it flags the leases that deviate from the standard form so reviewers read only those.
The step by step method, field by field.
Learn moreReconcile tenant estoppels against the lease before closing.
Learn moreUnderwrite the collateral income from the lease itself.
Learn morePortfolio-wide lease data for underwriting and reporting.
Learn moreRebuild a whole portfolio rent roll in one batch.
Learn moreThe full overview of our AI lease abstraction tool.
Learn more