The rent roll is the single most information-dense document in commercial real estate. A good one tells you, in 30 rows or less, exactly what you're buying: who the tenants are, how long they'll pay, at what rate, and what your rollover risk looks like.

A bad rent roll hides problems. Your job is to learn to see past the formatting and extract the five things that actually matter.

What a rent roll looks like

Here's a simplified example — a 6-tenant strip center:

| Suite | Tenant | SF | Start | End | Monthly | Annual | PSF | Type | Escalations | |---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---| | A | AutoZone | 7,400 | 3/2017 | 3/2032 | 13,750 | 165,000 | 22.30 | NNN | 10% option 1 | | B | Dry Cleaner | 1,200 | 6/2021 | 5/2026 | 2,500 | 30,000 | 25.00 | NNN | 3%/yr | | C | Pizza Shop | 1,500 | 1/2019 | 12/2028 | 2,000 | 24,000 | 16.00 | NNN | Flat | | D | Nail Salon | 1,200 | 8/2023 | 7/2026 | 1,800 | 21,600 | 18.00 | NNN | Flat | | E | Vacant | 1,500 | — | — | 0 | 0 | — | — | — | | F | Insurance Agent | 1,200 | 9/2020 | 8/2025 | 1,650 | 19,800 | 16.50 | MG | Flat |

Totals: 14,000 SF total, 12,500 occupied, 1,500 vacant, $260,400 annual in-place rent.

Let's walk through what each column tells you.

Column 1: Suite / unit number

Looks innocent. Actually matters for two reasons:

Physical layout — which suites are end caps (more visible, more valuable), which are interior, which are second-floor, etc.
Cross-checking against other documents — the T-12 and the broker's pro forma should both reference these unit numbers consistently. When they don't, the rent roll has probably been re-labeled to hide vacancies.

Column 2: Tenant name

This is where credit quality shows up. You're looking at one of four possibilities:

Investment-grade national credit (AutoZone, Walgreens, Starbucks, Chase Bank). Rated BBB- or higher by S&P/Moody's. Rock solid — the lease is essentially a bond.
Non-rated national or regional chain (Jersey Mike's franchise, regional urgent care, local multi-location boutique). Usually fine but not rated, so you're relying on unit-level economics.
Local mom-and-pop (Tony's Pizza, Lucia's Nail Salon, Dave the Insurance Agent). High failure rate. Underwrite as if the lease could vanish tomorrow.
Blank / "vacant" — missing income you'll need to replace.

In our example: AutoZone is the one credit-worthy tenant. Everything else is mom-and-pop. That radically changes how you underwrite the deal — you're really buying an AutoZone with four bonus tenants.

Column 3: Square footage

Two things to check:

Does it add up to the building's total SF? Landlords sometimes miscount — "14,000 SF building" but the rent roll shows 14,500 SF leased. That 500 SF difference is either double-counted common area being billed to tenants, or a ghost tenant, or measurement error.
What percentage is vacant? 1,500 / 14,000 = 10.7% vacant in our example. That's the physical vacancy rate. Keep it in your head.

Column 4 & 5: Start and end dates

This is where rollover risk lives. Make a mental map of when leases expire:

AutoZone: March 2032 — 6 years out. Very safe.
Dry Cleaner: May 2026 — under 12 months. Red flag.
Pizza Shop: December 2028 — ~3 years. Average.
Nail Salon: July 2026 — under 12 months. Red flag.
Insurance Agent: August 2025 — expired. Either month-to-month now or silently renewed. You need the lease document to know which.

So in this deal, 4 of 6 tenants have lease expirations in the next 24 months. That's 46% of the non-anchor SF rolling. On day one you own an AutoZone plus a collection of small tenants who all get to decide in the next year or two whether to re-sign or walk.

Column 6 & 7: Monthly and annual rent

Quick sanity check: monthly × 12 should equal annual. If it doesn't, there's probably a scheduled increase mid-year or the rent roll is stale.

Add up the "Annual" column to get your in-place gross rent — this is the starting point for every income calculation on the deal.

In our example: $260,400 per year in in-place base rent.

Column 8: PSF (rent per square foot)

This is the most important diagnostic column on the rent roll.

Compare each tenant's PSF to the market rate for that type of space in that submarket. You'll get one of three answers:

At market — rent is where it should be. No upside or downside.
Below market — rent is lower than comparable spaces. This is upside. When that lease rolls, you can push rent up to market.
Above market — rent is higher than the market. This is downside. When that lease rolls, the tenant may leave, or you'll have to lower rent to retain them.

In our example (let's say Central Florida strip center market rate is $22/sq ft NNN):

AutoZone: $22.30 — at market ✓
Dry Cleaner: $25.00 — above market. When this lease rolls in 2026, watch out.
Pizza Shop: $16.00 — below market. Upside potential of ~$9,000/year if renewed at market.
Nail Salon: $18.00 — below market. Upside of ~$5,000/year.
Insurance Agent: $16.50 — below market, but note the lease is modified gross (MG), so you can't just compare directly to NNN market rents.

Finding below-market leases is how value-add investors make money. But pay close attention: above-market leases are where deals die.

Column 9: Lease type

NNN (triple net) — tenant pays property taxes, insurance, and maintenance on top of base rent. Your expenses are minimal.
MG (modified gross) — some expenses are on you, some on the tenant. Typically the landlord pays taxes and insurance; the tenant pays utilities and janitorial.
FSG / Gross — landlord pays everything. Rare in modern retail/industrial, still common in office.

In our example, 5 tenants are NNN and 1 (the insurance agent) is MG. This is fine, but you need to understand that the MG tenant doesn't reimburse you for their share of taxes and insurance — so your effective net rent from them is lower than the headline $16.50 PSF.

Column 10: Escalations

Are rents rising during the lease? Typical escalation structures:

Flat — no increases. Your NOI stays flat (actually declines in real terms due to inflation).
Fixed percentage — "3% annually" or "10% every 5 years." Common.
CPI — tied to consumer price inflation. Rare but popular in inflationary environments.
Option-period only — rent is flat during the primary term but bumps when the tenant exercises an option to renew.

In our example, only the dry cleaner has annual 3% bumps. The others are flat or only bump at option. This means NOI growth from in-place leases is minimal — most of your upside has to come from re-leasing at market rates.

The 5 things to flag in under 5 minutes

Every time you look at a rent roll, scan for these five things before anything else:

Top tenant concentration — what percentage of NOI comes from the single largest tenant? Over 50% is high concentration risk. Over 70% is dangerous unless that tenant has investment-grade credit and a long lease.
Near-term rollover — what percentage of rent rolls in the next 24 months?
Credit quality — how many tenants are investment grade vs. mom-and-pop?
Rent-to-market — how many leases are below market (upside) vs. above market (downside)?
Current vacancy — what's actually vacant today, and has it been vacant for a long time?

A sharp investor can answer these five questions in 5 minutes on any rent roll. By the end of this course, so will you.

Our example, in one breath

"A 14,000 sq ft Central Florida strip center anchored by AutoZone, which is 63% of NOI on a credit lease through 2032. The other 37% is mom-and-pop tenants on shorter leases, with $14,000 of below-market upside on the pizza and nail salon, offset by above-market dry cleaner rent that's rolling in 11 months. Physical vacancy is 10.7%. Near-term rollover is 46% of non-anchor SF."

That's the rent roll reduced to 60 seconds of underwriting. It tells you immediately that this deal is really an AutoZone with rental income decoration — so your valuation should be driven mostly by the AutoZone lease, with the rest as upside/downside around that core.

What to take away

The rent roll has 10 columns; 5 of them drive your decision
The 5 things that matter: tenant concentration, rollover risk, credit quality, rent-to-market, vacancy
Compare each tenant's PSF to market rent and flag below- and above-market leases
Understand the lease-type column — NNN, MG, and Gross are very different deals
The broker's pro forma always marks up below-market leases but rarely marks down above-market ones — spot-check both directions
You should be able to read any rent roll in under 5 minutes

Next lesson: the T-12 and how to find the real "normalized NOI" hiding inside 12 months of messy data.

How to Read a Rent Roll Like a Broker