How do you build the rent roll a portfolio lender wants?

THE NUMBERS

ILLUSTRATIVE — published program floors, not a quote or a commitment to lend. Subject to underwriting, appraisal and final credit approval.

What are the seven columns, exactly?

Address first, complete enough to pull a valuation and a flood determination — street, city, state and zip, not a nickname. Unit count next, because a duplex and two single-families price and reserve differently even at the same rent. Then purchase price or current value: use the contract price on a purchase, and a recent value on a refinance, whether that is a broker opinion, an AVM or a prior appraisal. Monthly rent is the in-place lease amount, or the appraiser's market rent if the unit is vacant. Annual taxes and annual insurance come from the current bill or the binder, not an estimate carried over from a prior owner. Annual HOA, where none exists, should read zero rather than being left blank.

What format does the paste actually need to be in?

Tab or comma separated, one property per row, with the seven values in the order above and no header text pasted into the data itself. A spreadsheet copied straight from Excel, Google Sheets or a property-management export pastes as tabs by default and drops in cleanly. If you are typing it by hand, commas work identically. The Property Pool parses each row independently, so one malformed line will not block the rest of the portfolio — it will simply flag that address for you to fix.

Where do investors most often get the rent roll wrong?

Two mistakes account for most of the back-and-forth. The first is mixing units into a single blended rent figure for a multi-unit property instead of reporting the total monthly rent with the correct unit count, which throws off per-door reserve and pricing checks. The second is carrying forward a seller's insurance premium or a pre-reassessment tax bill on a purchase, which understates PITIA and produces an aggregate DSCR that will not survive underwriting. Pull a live insurance quote and a forward tax estimate for every purchase property before you paste the roll.

Does every property need the same level of documentation?

The rent roll itself is uniform across the pool, but the backing documents are not collected all at once. Leases or rent schedules, tax bills, insurance binders and HOA statements are still requested per property during underwriting, in the same way they would be for a single loan. The rent roll's job is to get the whole portfolio priced and scoped in one pass; the file-by-file documentation follows once the structure is agreed.

How does the rent roll change if the portfolio is a mix of purchases and refinances?

List purchases and refinances in the same roll, using purchase price for the former and current value for the latter — do not blend the two into one column. Payoff amounts on refinance properties are collected separately once the file opens; they are not part of the rent-roll paste. Mixed portfolios are common and do not need to be split into two submissions, provided each row is clearly one property with its own correct figures.

What happens after the roll is submitted?

The desk runs each property through the same DSCR and leverage tests used on a single loan, then aggregates the results into a pooled term sheet — covered in detail in the aggregate DSCR lesson below. A clean, correctly formatted rent roll is usually the difference between a same-week indicative term sheet and a slower back-and-forth clarifying figures line by line, so it is worth the extra ten minutes to get the source data right before pasting.

A three-property paste, tab-separated

Illustrative figures only, formatted to show the paste order. The desk confirms every value, tax and insurance line against source documents before pricing.

WHAT WE NEED FROM YOU

• Rent roll paste. The seven-column format above, one property per row.
• Leases or rent schedules. Per property, once the portfolio is scoped.
• Tax bills. Current bill, or a forward estimate on a purchase that will reassess.
• Insurance binders. Live quotes naming the borrowing entity, not the seller's premium.
• Entity documents. Formation documents and EIN for the borrowing entity across the portfolio.

FREQUENT QUESTIONS

Can I submit an Excel file instead of pasting?

The Property Pool is built around the paste, but the same seven columns copied straight from a spreadsheet paste in correctly without reformatting.

What if a property has no HOA?

Enter zero rather than leaving the field blank, so the row parses correctly.

Do vacant units get left out of the rent roll?

No — include them with the appraiser's market rent or a comparable estimate, flagged as vacant, so the pool can size around them.

Can purchases and refinances go in the same paste?

Yes, provided purchase price and current value are not mixed into a single column.

What happens if one row has an error?

The Property Pool flags that row for correction without holding up the rest of the portfolio.

RELATED

TERMS IN THIS LESSON

IN THIS COURSE

1. 7.1Blanket vs individual
2. 7.2Building the rent roll
3. 7.3Release provisions
4. 7.4Aggregate DSCR
5. 7.5Scaling past ten doors
6. 7.6Refinancing a portfolio