Asked for the abatement schedule instead of the rent roll, which is why I invested

This is a small one. $25k into an eight tenant office and flex building, roughly 34,000 sf, single story, in a suburb where a lot of the tenants are contractors and small medical.

The rent roll the sponsor sent showed an average of $17.40/sf. I didn't know enough to argue with that, so I asked a question I was slightly embarrassed by: are any of these tenants currently not paying that, and when did each one start paying?

What came back was a schedule showing free rent periods and any stepped ramps. Two tenants had two months of free rent left, one had a ramp that started at $14 and reached $17.40 in year three. Everyone else was paying face rent, in cash, that month. So collected rent was about 91 percent of the rent roll number, and I could see exactly where the gap was and when it closed.

The reason that mattered: on a different deal I'd looked at a month earlier, the same question produced a rent roll where the average was $24 and the collected number was $16, because half the building was in year one of long abatement periods. Same headline. Very different building.

Sixteen months in, this one has distributed at an annualized 6.5 percent, quarterly, on time. Occupancy went from 88 to 92 when a tenant expanded into an adjacent suite. Nothing dramatic has happened, which for office right now is the outcome I wanted.

The question I'd keep asking: what did you actually collect last month, per tenant, and how is that different from the rent roll.