What columns should a multifamily rent roll include?

Unit number, unit type/floorplan, square footage, market rent, actual (in-place) rent, concessions, other charges (RUBS/pet/parking), lease start/end dates, deposit, and delinquency status. Missing any of these, especially market rent, makes loss-to-lease impossible to calculate directly from the roll.

How do you calculate loss-to-lease from a rent roll?

Subtract in-place rent from market rent for each unit, divide by market rent, and average by unit type. 5-10% is typical embedded upside on a value-add deal; near 0% means the rents are already at market and the growth thesis is already captured by the seller.

Why doesn't the rent roll total match the T-12 rental income line?

Common causes: model/employee units counted as occupied on the roll but excluded from revenue, RUBS or other income booked as separate GL lines instead of rolled into the unit's income, and proration timing on mid-month move-ins/move-outs. A gap under 1.5% is usually explainable; anything higher needs a line-by-line reconciliation.

How do you analyze a rent roll?

Compare every row to the executed lease, tie totals to the GL, compute loss-to-lease, build the expiration schedule, and audit delinquencies. The automated version is a rent roll audit tool.

Multifamily · Rent Roll Analysis

Multifamily Rent Roll Analysis

How to read a multifamily rent roll: unit-level columns, RUBS reconciliation, concession burn, and loss-to-lease traps buyers miss. Free template.

Get the Excel template Automate it with Moraine

Why the rent roll analysis looks different for multifamily

A multifamily rent roll is a unit-by-unit ledger (150-400 rows, one per unit) carrying market rent, actual rent, concessions, deposit, lease dates, and delinquency status. There's no lease abstract layer between the roll and the leases; the roll is the primary evidence, cross-checked directly against signed leases rather than summarized from them.

Because renewals reset rent to market rather than stepping on a schedule, the rent roll is a snapshot, not a forward projection. Reconciling it means tying the current-month total to trailing GL collections and the T-12 rental income line, then explaining any gap through RUBS timing, prorated move-outs, or model-unit exclusions.

Three things break underwriting from inside the roll: concessions that appear in the free-rent field but not in the pro forma's Year 2 assumptions, RUBS recoveries booked as a separate GL line so the roll looks light on income, and near-zero loss-to-lease on a value-add deal, which means the rent growth thesis has already been captured.

The multifamily-specific checklist

1

Tie rent roll to leases

Verify: every tenant has an executed lease on file
2

Reconcile to GL

Verify: three months of collections match rent roll totals within 1%
3

Compute loss-to-lease

Verify: effective vs. scheduled rent; flag >8%
4

Build expiration schedule

Verify: year-by-year; flag any single year >30% of NOI
5

Check delinquencies

Verify: 30+, 60+, 90+ buckets; flag >2% of GSR
6

Pull the full unit-level rent roll and confirm row count matches unit count

Verify: no blank/omitted units; model, employee, and offline units flagged separately from occupied, rent-paying units
7

Tie rent roll total to trailing 3-month GL collections

Verify: variance under 1.5%; anything higher needs a RUBS or proration explanation
8

Cross-reference concession and free-rent fields against 10% of signed leases

Verify: concession amount and remaining term match lease language, not just the roll's shorthand notation
9

Calculate loss-to-lease by unit type

Verify: (market rent − actual rent) / market rent; flag any unit type under 2% on a value-add deal
10

Segment delinquency by unit and days-past-due

Verify: any unit appearing in 60+ day delinquency across two consecutive months
11

Reconcile RUBS/utility billback column to utility invoices

Verify: recovery rate versus pro forma assumption; flag any month under 60%

Metrics that matter for multifamily

Metric	Target	Calculation
Rent-roll-to-GL variance	<1.5%	(rent roll monthly total − trailing 3-mo avg GL rental collections) / rent roll monthly total
Loss-to-lease by unit type	5–10% (value-add), <2% flags no upside	(market rent − in-place rent) / market rent, averaged by unit type
RUBS recovery rate	>70%	utility recoveries billed / total utility expense on the T-12
Economic vacancy	5–7%	1 - (effective rent / gross scheduled rent)
Expense ratio	35–45% of EGI	opex / EGI
Break-even occupancy	<85%	(opex + debt service) / GSR

Red flags unique to multifamily

Rent roll shows near-zero loss-to-lease on a value-add underwrite

the upside the sponsor is underwriting has already been captured by the seller through renewals at market, there's no rent growth left to execute
Concession field on the roll doesn't match the free-rent schedule in the lease

the roll often shows only the current month's concession, hiding multi-month burn that persists into the next owner's Year 1 and Year 2
RUBS/utility recovery column trends down over the trailing 6 months without a rent roll explanation

recovery erosion is usually a submeter failure or a billing vendor lapse, both are NOI leaks that don't self-correct after closing
Loss-to-lease exceeding 8%

signals stale leases or mismanaged rent growth; the in-place roll understates market
Concessions over 1 month average

demand weakness the broker's pro forma almost never prices in
RUBS recovery under 60%

expense inflation flows directly to NOI because recoveries are capped below market
Single-month trailing collections under 96%

rising delinquency typically precedes a 2-3% NOI miss within two quarters

Example — multifamily rent roll analysis walkthrough

Take a 224-unit Class B multifamily acquisition in Charlotte at $48.5M, about $216,500/unit. The rent roll shows 212 occupied units, a $1,875 average rent, and a rent roll total of $397,500/month, annualizing to $4.77M, against which the broker's T-12 shows $4.62M in rental income and a 96.9% underwritten occupancy.

Tie the roll total to the trailing 3-month GL first. Actual collections average $381,200/month, a 4.1% shortfall against the roll and well outside the 1.5% threshold. Line by line, the gap traces to 6 of the "occupied" units on the roll are model units and leasing-office staff units, carrying a market-rent notation but generating zero rent revenue. Reclassify those 6 units correctly and the roll's true rent-paying occupancy is 206 units rather than 212, a 2.7-point occupancy overstatement.

Next, loss-to-lease. With the corrected 206 rent-paying units, in-place rent averages $1,875 against a $1,940 market rent on the same unit types, a 3.3% loss-to-lease consistent with modest embedded upside. That checks out against the value-add thesis.

The RUBS column is worse. Utility billback shows $18,400/month recovered against $31,000/month in total utility expense on the T-12, a 59% recovery rate, below the 70% target and meaningfully below the 74% the pro forma assumed. Pulling 6 months of submeter invoices confirms the shortfall is real: one of two RUBS vendors stopped billing three buildings after a software migration five months prior, and the property manager hadn't caught it.

Net the two findings: 6 non-revenue units the roll miscounted as occupied, worth roughly $135,000/year in overstated top-line rent, and $12,600/month ($151,200/year) in uncollected RUBS recovery once corrected forward. That's a $286,200 annual NOI correction against the $4.62M T-12, a 6.2% haircut, and roughly $5.45M of valuation impact at a 5.25% exit cap. Both corrections carry forward: the occupancy overstatement compounds through every revenue line, and the RUBS shortfall persists until the vendor lapse is fixed. The corrected roll, not the broker's version, becomes the revenue schedule the underwriting model starts from.