Analysis for landlords and letting agents.
A rent roll shows a balance on a date. Almost everything worth knowing is in the pattern behind it.
- Read5 min
- Sections4
Which of my tenants are actually a problem?
Separate being behind from paying late. A rent roll shows a balance, which says nothing about the tenant who clears it on the twenty-eighth every month, and habitual lateness is the earliest available signal of arrears to come. Then put lease expiries on a calendar with the income attached, because individually unremarkable endings stack into a quarter.
01
Late is not the same as behind
A tenant who pays on the twenty-eighth every month is current on every rent roll and is the tenant most likely to be in arrears next quarter.
Reconstruct payment timing from the ledger rather than reading the balance, and rank tenants by the pattern rather than by the number.
02
Expiries stack
Leases ending are individually unremarkable and collectively a cliff. Laid out by month with income attached, a quarter carrying a fifth of the rent becomes visible while there is still time to act.
This is the analysis most worth automating, because its value depends entirely on doing it early and it is the one nobody does until it is late.
Occupancy at 96% and a fifth of the income expiring in one quarter are both true at once, and only one of them is on the report.
03
Occupancy is three states
Occupied and paying, occupied and not paying, and vacant are collapsed by a single occupancy percentage into one flattering figure.
Count them separately and state the rent at risk in money rather than in units, because two units at different rents are not two units.
04
What to upload
The rent roll and the payment ledger. The roll alone gives you balances; the ledger is what turns those into payment behaviour, which is where the early signal is.
Lease start and end dates make the expiry calendar possible. A PDF from the agent is workable, since tables are lifted out and checked against the totals printed on the same page, though a spreadsheet export is better.
See it on a real project
Two clients, 38% of revenue, accounted for every one of the 38 overdrawn days.
Is winter actually our slow season?Related
Try it on your own file.
Every check described here runs automatically, and your first findings arrive in full before you pay for any of it.
No account needed to start. You only pay when you like what you see.