What to Pull From a Commercial Lease Before Refinancing

Why the lender asks for more than the rent roll

A rent roll tells a lender what a property collects today. It does not tell them what could change that number during the loan term: a renewal option the tenant can exercise below market, a termination right that lets the anchor tenant walk with six months notice, or a co-tenancy clause that cuts another tenant's rent if the anchor leaves. Underwriting a loan against the property means underwriting those contingencies too, which is why the lender's due diligence request goes tenant by tenant into the actual lease language instead of stopping at the summary rent figure.

The request usually arrives as a checklist attached to the loan application: current leases and all amendments, a rent roll, estoppel certificates, and sometimes an SNDA from each tenant. The leases and amendments are what the lender's counsel actually reads. The rent roll only holds up if it matches what those documents say.

The terms that get pulled tenant by tenant

For each tenancy, the file needs to answer: what is the current base rent and does an escalation land during the loan term, when does the term expire, what renewal or termination options exist and what notice do they require, what security deposit is held and in what form, who pays taxes, insurance, and common area costs and are there caps or exclusions on those obligations, and does anything in the lease or a side letter conflict with what the rent roll shows.

Options are usually the part that takes the longest to get right, because a renewal or termination window is rarely a fixed calendar date. It is defined relative to expiration, so many months before the term ends, and if an amendment extended the term, the window has to be recalculated from the current expiration date, not the original one. A lender reviewing the loan will do this math on their own eventually. Getting there first means the rent roll and the underwriting hold together instead of getting revised mid-process.

Where the numbers stop matching

The gap between a rent roll and the underlying leases usually shows up in three places. First, an amendment changed a rent step or extended the term and the rent roll was never updated to reflect it. Second, a side letter granted a concession, an abatement period or a reduced escalation, that never made it into the lease file the rent roll was built from. Third, an option was exercised or expired and the rent roll still shows the original option schedule.

Each of those is a small discrepancy on its own, but a lender who finds one during diligence starts checking the rest of the rent roll line by line, which slows the process and can affect the loan terms the property qualifies for. Finding and resolving the discrepancies before the file goes to the lender is the difference between a refinance that moves on schedule and one that stalls on document requests.

Building the file before the lender asks

The landlord's leverage in a refinance is having the answers ready, not producing them under a deadline set by the lender's counsel. That means a current rent roll checked against the actual lease chain for every tenancy, a clean list of options with their notice windows already calculated, and any side letters or unrecorded amendments pulled into the file rather than left in an email folder somewhere.

This is general information about what a refinance typically requires, not legal or financial advice. What a specific lender will ask for, how a discrepancy should be resolved, and what representations a landlord should be comfortable making about the collateral are questions for the lender's actual requirements and, where the stakes are meaningful, for counsel.

Common questions