A rent roll is the unit-by-unit snapshot a seller, broker, or property manager hands you with a deal. It lists who occupies each unit, what the lease says they pay, and when that lease ends, all tied to one as-of date. If you underwrite multifamily, that file is the income side of the screen. The trailing twelve months tells you what the property collected and spent. The rent roll tells you whether today's leases can support the income you are about to model.
See how Slung reads a rent roll
People also ask what is a rent roll when they are buying their first small building, and the answers online are written for landlords tracking late rent. That is a different job. An acquisition team uses the same kind of report to test the broker's story before anyone writes a letter of intent. This guide covers what belongs on the report, how to read it on a live deal, and where you still have to open the source documents. It is not a template, a tax worksheet, or a full diligence checklist.
What is a rent roll on a multifamily deal?
On a multifamily acquisition, a rent roll is a schedule of every unit as of a stated date. One row is one unit, or sometimes one bed in seniors housing. The row names the tenant, the unit, the unit type, the contract rent, and the lease dates. Vacant units stay on the schedule so you can see the hole in income, not just the occupied average.
Think of it as a census of the leases, not a bank statement. It does not prove that rent was deposited. It does not show repairs, payroll, or taxes. Those live on the trailing twelve, usually called the T-12. A clean screen uses both. The rent roll sets in-place rent and the lease calendar. The T-12 tests whether collections and expenses match that story.
Broker packages rarely use one layout. A Yardi export, a RealPage export, and a scanned PDF from a local manager can all be called a rent roll and still disagree on column names. Some files show market rent next to contract rent. Some bury concessions in a note. Some omit the as-of date entirely. Your job on the first pass is to learn which questions this particular file can answer, and which ones it cannot.
A one-page flyer can name unit count, average rent, and occupancy. It cannot replace the rent roll. Flyer averages hide the cheap leases, the free months, and the units that are actually empty. If the flyer arrives first, treat every income figure as a placeholder until the unit file shows up.
What a lender expects on the rent roll
Private buyers can accept a messy export. Agency lenders cannot. Freddie Mac's Multifamily Seller/Servicer Guide, Chapter 55, tells sellers what a rent roll must contain before it goes into an underwriting package. The guide was updated in a bulletin dated October 20, 2026. For a property that is not seniors housing, the rent roll has to be dated within 30 days of the package submission, and it has to be complete for each unit.
That list is a useful standard even when you are not selling the loan to Freddie Mac. It is the field set a serious counterparty will ask for later. If the broker file is missing half of it, you should know that on day one, not at the lender's diligence call. The guide also points sellers to an optional rent roll template. That template is a lender form. It is not a workbook for your own model, and it is not something you need to download to read a deal.
Chapter 55 is lender documentation, not a statute that binds every private purchase. A cash buyer can close on a thinner file. You still want the same fields, because the fields are what make the income traceable. Seniors housing uses a different list. Medicaid reimbursement, entrance fees, care fees, and ancillary charges are broken out separately there. Do not force the conventional 18 items onto that asset.
The fields that change the screen
Eighteen required items is a lot to stare at. Group them by the question they answer. The first group identifies the unit and the person. The second group is the rent you can actually underwrite. The third group is the lease calendar and the special statuses that should not be blended into a market-rent average.
| Question | Fields on the file | What a bad read does |
|---|---|---|
| Which unit, and as of when? | As-of date, tenant name, unit ID, beds and baths, square footage, and occupancy status. | You average the wrong mix. Or you trust a file that is already stale. |
| What rent is in place? | Monthly contract rent, concessions, rebates, arrearages, and the subsidy type. | You model rent the tenant is not paying. Or you miss free months. |
| How long does it last? | Occupancy date, lease start, expiration, renewal options, month-to-month status, and the deposit. | You miss a stack of expirations. Or you treat a deposit as income. |
| Should this unit be in the average? | Employee, model, corporate, and office units. Also rent control and furnished status. | A model unit or an employee unit pulls the average away from market rent. |
Freddie Mac lists those items in that spirit for non-seniors properties, and it requires the seller to certify the rent roll with Form 1112, the Borrower and Key Borrower Principal Blanket Certification. Certification is the seller's statement. It is not a substitute for your own tie-out. A certified number can still be miscoded, especially when a manager exports "charge codes" that do not match the lease face.
Two fields deserve extra care. Concessions change the rent you should spread across the lease term. A unit at $1,800 with two free months is not an $1,800 unit for the year you are modeling. Subsidies need a type, because a housing voucher and a tax-credit restriction behave differently when you mark rents to market. If the file only says "subsidy" with no type, leave a question in the model rather than guessing the upside.
How acquisition teams use the file
The first use is a go-or-no-go screen, before anyone builds a full model. Sort by lease expiration and count how many units roll in the next six and twelve months. Sort by unit type and compare contract rent with the rent the broker claims is achievable. Flag every employee, model, and corporate unit so they do not sit inside the occupied average. If the as-of date is older than the rest of the package, ask for a newer export before you trust occupancy.
The second use is the bridge from rent roll to T-12. In-place contract rent, minus vacancy and minus concessions, should be in the same neighborhood as collected rent on the trailing twelve. A wide gap is not automatically fraud. It can be timing, bad debt, or a manager who books concessions in a strange account. It is a question you resolve before you lean on the broker's net operating income. Loss-to-lease, the space between contract rent and market rent, is a claim about the future. The rent roll only supports it if market rent is sourced somewhere else, usually comps, not the seller's own column.
The third use is the lease calendar for the business plan. A value-add story is weak if most leases expire after the hold you are using. It is also weak if many units are already month to month at market. Renewal options matter for the same reason. A tenant with a cheap renewal right is not a vacant unit you can reprice on day one.
None of this is a finished underwriting. It is the read that tells you whether the packet is worth a deeper model. Slung's docs describe the same split. You can forward a flyer, an offering memorandum, a rent roll, or a T-12 and get a model to edit. The flyer starts the file. The rent roll and the T-12 are what make the income and expenses specific. You still override line items and the unit mix before you rely on them.
Where the rent roll stops
A rent roll will not show operating expenses, capital items, or debt. It will not show whether a tenant actually paid last month, unless the manager added an arrearage column and kept it current. It will not show unit condition. A long-occupied unit at a low rent may also need a renovation the rent roll cannot see. Pair the file with the T-12, the offering memorandum, and, later, the leases.
New construction is the clearest exception. Freddie Mac's Chapter 55 says a rent roll is not required in the full underwriting package for a mortgage originated for new construction under a forward commitment. There are no in-place leases to list. In that case the income case is a lease-up assumption, and you should label it that way. Do not backfill a fake in-place rent roll from the pro forma.
Commercial space on the ground floor often arrives as a separate schedule, or as a few rows that do not match the apartment columns. Keep it out of the residential unit mix. A retail lease with percentage rent will wreck an average rent per unit if you blend it in. The same is true of a manager's unit that shows zero rent. Zero can mean "employee housing." It can also mean a vacant unit coded wrong. Read the status column before you decide.
Check the file against the source documents
Extraction is a head start, not a sign-off. Property-management exports use charge codes, merged cells, and unit-type labels that do not match the lease. Scanned rent rolls add a second problem. A smudged digit in the rent column, or a handwritten concession in the margin, will not survive a casual copy into a model. Slung's product docs tell users to review the extraction and to edit line items and the unit mix before relying on the numbers. That instruction is the point of the workflow, not a footnote.
On a first pass, do these checks before you lock income:
- Read the as-of date and compare it with the offering memorandum and the T-12 period. If they disagree, write down which date you are using.
- Count units on the rent roll and match that count to the flyer, the OM, and the unit mix in your model. A missing unit is missing income.
- Add contract rent for occupied units and compare it with the income lines on the T-12. Investigate a gap. Do not force the tie.
- List concessions, subsidies, and non-revenue units on their own rows. Do not let them hide inside the average.
- Pull the leases for a sample of units, including a recent move-in, a concession, and a month-to-month tenant. Match rent, dates, and deposits to the roll.
- Only then adjust vacancy, loss-to-lease, and renewal assumptions. Mark anything you could not verify.
Supported uploads in Slung are Excel, CSV, and PDF, including exports from systems such as Yardi, RealPage, AppFolio, Entrata, MRI, and Rent Manager. You do not have to reformat those exports first. You do have to read them. A clean spreadsheet can still use a charge code your model will misread as base rent. If the scan is truncated or the handwriting is the only record of a concession, ask for the page again. Do not invent the missing cell.
Messy files are normal. Slung has written separately about why a "clean" rent roll is a myth and what that means for turning rent-roll files into a model. That piece is about the conversion problem. This one is about what the rows mean. Read both if you are new to the packet, and do not treat either one as investment advice. An extracted model can be wrong. You are responsible for the numbers you send to a partner or a lender.
From the rent roll to a model you can edit
Once the fields are clear, the model is a set of choices. Which rent do you hold in place? Which leases do you mark to a comp set, and when? Which units stay out of the average because they are employee or model units? Those choices should sit in an editable workbook, not in a screenshot of the broker's PDF. Slung builds that workbook from the documents you provide, then lets you change the unit mix, expenses, and assumptions and export Excel.
Keep the free workbook and the deal export straight. The free multifamily underwriting workbook is a blank model you can download without an account. It is not the app, and it is not a paid plan. A deal-specific export is a different file, built from the property you uploaded, and you can re-export it after you edit the live model. Plans on the site are Free Analyst, Principal monthly, and Principal annual. Pricing is published as "call for pricing," so ask rather than assuming a seat count or a deal limit.
If you want the product path, start with the underwriting docs. They cover upload, email to Sam at sam\@slung.ai, the property dashboard, and Excel export. Email is an entry, not a way around an account. A new sender may be asked to sign up, and email underwriting can depend on the plan. If the work you need is a custom workflow for a whole acquisitions team, that is a different conversation from running one rent roll. The docs are the right door for a single deal.
Frequently asked questions
What is a rent roll in one sentence?
A rent roll is a dated, unit-by-unit list of tenants, contract rent, concessions, and lease terms for a property. For multifamily, it is the in-place income schedule you test before you trust a broker's averages.
How is a rent roll different from a T-12?
The rent roll is a snapshot of leases as of one date. The T-12 is a trailing record of income and expenses, usually twelve months. You need the snapshot to see who pays what. You need the trailing record to see what was actually collected and spent.
How is a rent roll different from a rent ledger?
A rent roll has one line per unit and shows the current lease terms. A rent ledger has one line per charge or payment for a single tenant. Landlords use ledgers to chase balances. Acquisition teams use the roll to underwrite the whole property.
Does every deal include a rent roll?
No. Stabilized properties should have one, and agency lenders ask for a recent, complete file. New construction under a forward commitment may not have in-place leases at all. A flyer is not a substitute. If the rent roll is missing, say so in the model and keep the income case labeled as an assumption.
Can software read the rent roll for you?
Software can extract rows from Excel, CSV, and PDF and drop them into a model you can edit. It cannot decide that a scanned concession or an odd charge code is correct. Review the unit mix and the source file before you share the output. Nothing in that output is financial, tax, or investment advice.
