A rent roll is a short document that most owners read for one number. Collections came in, collections looked fine, the statement gets filed. That number is the least predictive thing on the page — it describes a month that has already closed. The lines that tell you what the next twelve months look like sit underneath it.
1. Arrears by age, not by amount
Two lakh outstanding across eight tenants at fifteen days is a scheduling problem. Two lakh outstanding from one tenant at ninety days is a legal problem, and it is worth five times the management attention. Ask for arrears bucketed at 0–30, 31–60, 61–90 and 90-plus days. The shape of that distribution is the single best early indicator of trouble in a building.
2. Expiry concentration
Look twelve months ahead and count how many leases end in the same quarter. Buildings that were fully let in one leasing push tend to empty in one leasing push. If more than a third of your area expires in a single quarter, you are carrying a risk that no amount of good collection performance offsets. We deliberately stagger renewals by offering odd tenures — eleven months, then twenty-three, then thirty-five — to break that clustering.
3. Effective rent versus headline rent
Headline rent is what the agreement says. Effective rent is what you actually retain after rent-free fit-out periods, brokerage, and any maintenance the owner absorbed to close the deal, amortised across the term. A deal signed at a proud number with three months rent-free and one month brokerage is roughly a fifteen percent discount on a two-year term. Statements that only show headline rent will flatter a leasing decision that was not, in fact, strong.
4. Recovery ratio on outgoings
What proportion of common area maintenance, water, and power actually got billed through to tenants and collected? A building running at ninety percent recovery is quietly funding ten percent of its own running costs out of the owner’s rent. That gap widens every year that maintenance charges are not revised, and it is almost never visible in the collection headline.
5. Deposit coverage
Deposits held, expressed in months of current rent, per tenant. Rents rise; deposits collected three years ago do not. A tenant sitting on a deposit worth four months of the rent they signed at may be sitting on two and a half months of what they pay today. That difference is your entire cushion if they leave badly.
Five lines. Ten minutes. If your statement does not carry all five, ask for them — any manager who cannot produce them on request is not tracking them.