Reported 94% occupancy to 22 investors when the real number was 79%

The dating thing has almost got me twice in a different context. Folders full of PDFs named by the month they were generated instead of the month they cover, and nobody who made them thinks that's confusing because they know. Did the file name say the wrong month or did you just assume the newest file was the current month?

$600 a month bought your friend zero review time and you both knew that without saying it. At that price you can write the email or you can verify the email, you can't do both and still be paid for the hour. Five years of this and the pattern is always the same, the client prices the writing and forgets that checking is most of the work. I'd have quoted $600 for the draft and told him verification was his job, in writing, and then this is his mistake instead of yours.

Same thing as building off the plan instead of the as-built. Plan says the panel is on the north wall, the as-built says somebody moved it in week three, and the guy who moved it is not in the room when you're reading the plan. You went to the document that was easy to reach instead of the one that was current.

What would the written scope have actually said? I can picture "draft and send quarterly updates" and I can picture that sentence being useless, which is sort of the problem.

I put a data cutoff line at the bottom of every update I draft now. "Figures as of March 31 unless noted." It has saved me one embarrassment already, because a sponsor read it and said actually the lease-up number moved last week, and we changed it before it went out. Cheap line, takes four words.

The part I'd have panicked about is a correction letter going out with someone else's attorney writing it and my name on the original. Whether that puts anything on you rather than the sponsor is genuinely a lawyer question and I'd have paid for an hour of one before sending the second email. Not something anyone here should be answering for you.

Speaking to the PM side of it, those monthly packets are always lagging and it's usually accounting close, not laziness. Books close, then the report generates, then someone reviews it, and that's ten to twenty days after month end depending on how big the shop is. If you want current occupancy you ask the property manager for the rent roll as of today, which takes them about ninety seconds to export. Nobody ever asks. They read the packet because the packet is in the folder.

Lenders get fed the same stale packets and it causes the same fights, particularly when a covenant test lands on a number that's three weeks behind reality. The difference is the loan documents define which report counts and as of when. Investor letters usually define nothing, so whoever typed the number owns it.

Thirty unpaid hours to fix a $600 a month job. That's the whole lesson right there.

We run a two person check on anything with a figure in it. One person writes, a second person opens the source and reads the number out loud against the draft. It costs about fifteen minutes per document and it caught a transposed distribution amount last quarter, $4,180 written as $4,810 across eleven LPs. On a small team the second reader doesn't have to be senior, they just have to not be the writer.

Should you have sent it at all though? You weren't the sponsor, you had no way to know what the current number was, and you had no approval step. Feels like the mistake was earlier than the PDF, it was agreeing to be the person whose finger is on the button.

I don't buy thatch's version. Plenty of people do careful work at $600 a month, and plenty of people at $6,000 send stale numbers. What failed was that no one had defined where occupancy comes from. Double the fee and tally still opens the same folder and finds the same PDF.

trellis's point about the rent roll export is the actual fix in this thread. If the current number is ninety seconds away and nobody asks for it, that's a habit problem, and habits are cheaper to change than contracts.

I've made this exact mistake myself. I handed a guy my drive and said the numbers are all in there, and they were, in four versions with no dates, and then I was annoyed when he picked the wrong one. That was me. The sponsor owns the data room being legible, and I didn't.

Curious what the correction letter said. The wording of those is most of whether investors stay calm, and "we are writing to correct an error in our March update" reads very differently from an explanation of why the number moved.

As an LP I'd have shrugged at this. A fast correction with a plain reason reads as a shop that checks its own work. What actually damages me is finding out in month eight that a number I was given in month two was wrong and nobody mentioned it. You may be carrying more of this than the investors were.