Rent roll analysis usually ends where it should begin: at the total. A rent roll is not a snapshot of income. It is a schedule of expirations with rents attached, written in accounting conventions that can make the same property look like it is growing and shrinking at the same time. The sum at the bottom is the least informative number on the page. Read as a total, the rent roll confirms the pro forma. Read as a schedule, it interrogates it. Almost everyone reads it as a total.
Key Takeaways
A rent roll total sums contracts with different expiration dates, escalation structures, and credit behind them. The sum discards every one of those differences.
Expiration exposure is rent-weighted, not square-foot-weighted. In Douglas Emmett's in-service office portfolio, leases expiring in 2026 through 2028 covered 33.3% of square feet but 42.3% of annualized rent as of March 31, 2026.
The same leases can roll up and roll down at once. Douglas Emmett reported that leases signed in Q1 2026 carried straight-line value 5.3% higher than the prior leases while beginning cash rent came in 7.7% lower.
Leased is not occupied. Douglas Emmett's office leased rate was 80.9% against a 77.5% occupancy rate, a gap made entirely of signed leases that had not commenced and were paying nothing.
A rent roll inherits the accuracy of the lease abstracts behind it. Analysis without reconciliation to the executed documents is analysis of someone else's summary.
What Does Rent Roll Analysis Miss When It Stops at the Total?
Stopping at the total discards the three things that determine whether in-place income survives the hold: when each lease expires, which convention the rent is stated in, and how much of the income depends on how few tenants. The total is the one figure on a rent roll that no decision depends on.
Consider a 100,000 square foot building with four tenants.
Tenant | Square feet | Percent of SF | Rent per SF | Annual rent | Percent of rent | Expiration |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
A | 50,000 | 50.0% | $22.00 | $1,100,000 | 36.7% | 2033 |
B | 25,000 | 25.0% | $38.00 | $950,000 | 31.7% | 2027 |
C | 15,000 | 15.0% | $40.00 | $600,000 | 20.0% | 2027 |
D | 10,000 | 10.0% | $35.00 | $350,000 | 11.7% | 2031 |
Total | 100,000 | 100.0% | $30.00 | $3,000,000 | 100.0% |
The rent roll reports $3,000,000 and a blended $30.00 per square foot. No tenant in the building pays $30.00 per square foot. Tenant A, half the building, pays $22.00 on a lease running to 2033, which is either a below-market legacy rent or a correctly priced long-term anchor, and the total cannot tell you which. Tenants B and C both expire in 2027. They are 40% of the square footage and 51.7% of the rent. The building's income is far more exposed to a single year than its floor plan suggests.
Every number in that table came from the same document that produced the total. The total is the only one that hid them.
Why Does Lease Expiration Exposure Need to Be Weighted by Rent, Not Square Feet?
Because square footage and rent are not distributed the same way. High-rent suites are usually smaller, and low-rent anchors are usually larger, so a rollover schedule measured in square feet systematically understates the cash flow at risk. Weighting by annualized rent is the correction, and it is not a subtle one.
Douglas Emmett's Q1 2026 earnings package, filed with the SEC, discloses its in-service office lease expiration schedule as of March 31, 2026. The rent-weighted exposure runs consistently ahead of the square-foot exposure in every near-term year:
Year of expiration | Expiring SF as percent of total | Annualized rent as percent of total |
|---|---|---|
2026 | 8.1% | 10.1% |
2027 | 13.1% | 16.8% |
2028 | 12.1% | 15.4% |
Three-year total | 33.3% | 42.3% |
A third of the space, but 42.3% of the income, reprices inside three years. An asset manager tracking the square-foot column would size the exposure roughly nine points too low.
The same schedule contains a second signal that gets skipped. Douglas Emmett reports annualized rent per leased square foot two ways: $47.72 at March 31, 2026, and $53.74 at expiration. That 12.6% difference is contractual escalation already signed into the existing leases. It is growth that requires no releasing, no market recovery, and no assumption. It is also invisible in a rent roll read as a current-rent snapshot, which is how a pro forma ends up applying a market growth rate on top of bumps the leases already promised. For the mechanics of modeling a concentrated expiration year, see rollover risk.
Why Do Two Rent Rolls of the Same Building Disagree About the Rent?
Because the same lease produces different rent numbers under different conventions, and a rent roll rarely says which one it used. Cash rent is what the tenant pays on the measurement date. Straight-line rent is the average rent across the term. Free rent, escalations, and concessions sit between them, and the gap can invert the sign of the answer.
Douglas Emmett's Q1 2026 results make the point better than an argument can. The company reported that the straight-line value of leases executed in the quarter increased 5.3%, because fixed annual bumps in the 3% to 5% range more than offset beginning cash rent that came in 7.7% below the prior lease's ending cash rent. One quarter of leasing. Same tenants, same suites, same signatures. Up 5.3% on one convention, down 7.7% on the other.
Neither number is wrong. A rent roll that reports one without labeling it is what is wrong.
The market rent a rent roll is measured against carries the same problem. CBRE Research reported average U.S. office asking rent of $37.21 per square foot in Q1 2026 against taking rents of $33.35, a 10.4% spread, wider than the 8.6% spread in 2019. A loss-to-lease calculation run against asking rents rather than taking rents inherits that entire gap as phantom upside.
The second convention gap is occupancy. Douglas Emmett's office leased rate was 80.9% at March 31, 2026, against an occupancy rate of 77.5%, with 596,992 square feet of signed leases not commenced sitting in between. That 3.4 point spread is real leases with real signatures producing zero rent today. A rent roll that lists them without a commencement date reads as income. It is a receivable with a start date attached, and the difference matters to anyone modeling the first twelve months. The same distinction drives the gap between economic and physical occupancy.
Convention pair | What the first says | What the second says | Why the gap exists |
|---|---|---|---|
Cash vs straight-line rent | Rent paid today | Average rent over the term | Free rent, escalations, concessions |
Leased vs occupied | Space under contract | Space paying rent | Signed leases not yet commenced |
In-place vs market rent | What tenants pay | What the space would fetch | Term length and when the lease was signed |
Current vs expiring rent | Rent at measurement date | Rent in the final year | Contractual escalations |
How Do You Analyze a Rent Roll Like an Underwriter?
You read it as four questions, not one number: when does the income reprice, which convention is each number stated in, how concentrated is the rent, and does any of it tie to the executed leases. Only the fourth question can be answered outside the spreadsheet, and it is the one that determines whether the other three mean anything.
Step | What to test | What a failure looks like |
|---|---|---|
Build the expiration schedule | Group by expiration year, weight by annualized rent | 40% of SF turns out to be 52% of rent |
Label every rent column | Confirm cash or straight-line, gross or net, before or after concessions | A 5.3% roll-up that is a 7.7% cash roll-down |
Separate leased from occupied | Flag signed leases not commenced and their start dates | Year-one income overstated by the free-rent burn-off |
Measure concentration | Rank tenants by percent of rent, not percent of space | Top tenants at 4.9% of SF carrying 8.6% of rent |
Reconcile to the documents | Tie each rent, term, and option to the executed lease and amendments | An escalation in a third amendment that never reached the summary |
That last row is the constraint on all the others. A rent roll is a summary of the leases, and summaries lose information: an escalation buried in an amendment, a co-tenancy clause that lets an anchor go dark, a free-rent period still running. These live in the executed documents and may never reach the schedule a seller hands over. Sophisticated analysis of an unreconciled rent roll is precise arithmetic on someone else's assumptions.
The seller's incentive completes the picture. A rent roll is prepared by the party selling the asset, and it presents the property at its most financeable. It is not usually false. It is selective, and selection is invisible from inside the spreadsheet. Reconciliation is the only way to see it, which is why the underwriter's job is not to read the rent roll faster but to be able to trust it, ideally with a citation back to the page each number came from. For the mechanics of tying the schedule back to the documents, see how to read a rent roll and reconcile it to the leases.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is rent roll analysis?
Rent roll analysis is the examination of a property's tenant-by-tenant lease schedule to determine when income reprices, what conventions the rents are stated in, and how concentrated the income is. Done well, it reconciles every figure to the executed leases rather than accepting the schedule as delivered.
Why is the leased rate higher than the occupancy rate on a rent roll?
The leased rate includes signed leases that have not commenced, while the occupancy rate counts only space paying rent. Douglas Emmett's Q1 2026 filing shows the gap concretely: an 80.9% office leased rate against 77.5% occupancy, with 596,992 square feet signed but not yet commenced.
Does a rent roll show cash rent or straight-line rent?
It depends on the preparer, and many rent rolls do not say. Cash rent is what the tenant pays on the measurement date. Straight-line rent averages the contractual rent across the term. The two can move in opposite directions on the same lease, so the label matters more than the figure.
What does loss to lease look like on a rent roll?
It appears as a spread between in-place rents and current market rents, usually concentrated in the longest-dated leases signed in an earlier market. It reads as upside only if those leases expire inside the hold period. See loss to lease for how to read it at the unit level.
Conclusion
The rent roll is under-analyzed because it looks finished. It arrives as a clean spreadsheet with a total at the bottom, so it reads as a fact while the pro forma, visibly an argument, absorbs the diligence hours. Both are claims. Only one of them can be checked against executed documents.
The operators who get this right stop reading the rent roll as a sum and start reading it as a schedule: rent-weighted expirations, labeled conventions, concentration by income rather than area, and every figure tied back to a lease. The public filings show that the disciplined version of this work is standard practice at portfolio scale and disclosed quarterly. It is at the asset level, on the deal in front of you, that it still gets skipped.
Related
Sources
Douglas Emmett, Inc., Q1 2026 Earnings Package (Form 8-K, Exhibit 99.1), filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, data as of March 31, 2026.
Douglas Emmett, Inc., Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2026, definitions of Leased Rate, Occupancy Rate, and Rental Rate.
CBRE Research, Q1 2026 U.S. Office Market Report.