Why it is worth the typing
The dates on a rent roll are the whole point. A lease expiring in nine months is a listing, and a suite sitting empty is a listing right now. Both are yours to win if you get there first. Once the roll is in, those dates feed Properties > Available spaces, which gathers every empty and soon-to-be-empty space across all your buildings into one list.Most brokers who use this run under 20 buildings and add one or two a month. At around 15 suites a building, entering one is a few minutes of typing — usually done once by whoever handles admin, and everyone on the team sees the result.
Add a rent roll
Open the property, find the Rent Roll card, and click Add a rent roll. There are two ways in, and you can mix them freely.Load the spreadsheet you were sent
If the management company sent you a rent roll, use it. Click Choose a spreadsheet and pick the.xlsx or .csv, or copy the rows straight out of Excel and paste them into the box.
Use a spreadsheet if you can. PDF rent rolls are not accepted — see About PDFs below for what to do when that is all you were sent.
Include the heading row. CRE Fuel does not go by the column names — those are unreliable, and on real rolls two different columns are sometimes labelled the same thing — but it uses them to narrow down where to look, and then checks its reading against the arithmetic on the page.
Nothing is saved until you accept. You get a summary first:
3 new · 4 changed · 8 unchangedalong with anything worth a second look, such as a row where the rent and the per-square-foot figure do not agree with each other.
Or type them in
Click Add a space, fill in the row, and repeat for each suite. At around 15 suites a building this takes a few minutes. Only the unit number is required. Everything else can wait, so you can list the suites first and come back for the leases when you have the paperwork in front of you.Keeping it up to date from a new roll
When the next roll arrives, open the card and click Load an updated roll. CRE Fuel matches on the unit number and shows you only what moved — the rents that stepped, the tenant who left, the suite that came free. Accept it and the building is current.A tenant who has taken an extra suite is recognised as the same space growing, not as one space disappearing and another appearing.
About PDFs
Ask for a spreadsheet, not a PDF. We recommend against using a PDF rent roll, and CRE Fuel does not accept PDF files. A spreadsheet is a table; a PDF is a picture of one, and the difference is the difference between a roll that reads exactly and one you have to check by hand. The management company almost always has the spreadsheet. One email gets it, and it is worth sending. If a PDF really is all you have:- Open it and try to select the rows. If the text highlights, copy it and paste it into the box. That works fine.
- If nothing highlights, it is a scan — photographs of paper, with no text in it for anything to read. Type the suites in by hand, or go back and ask for the spreadsheet.
What each field is for
One lease can cover several suites
If a tenant holds two or three suites on a single lease, enter it as one space and list the units together:620-05, 620-06, 620-07. That is one lease with one rent and one expiry date, which is what it actually is. Splitting it into separate rows would mean inventing a rent and a square footage for each one.
Rent: type it the way you have it
You do not have to convert anything. Pick the basis that matches your paperwork:- $ / month — a monthly dollar amount
- $ / year — an annual dollar amount
- $ / SF / month
- $ / SF / year
What the closed card tells you
The Rent Roll card stays closed until you open it, because the summary line usually answers the question on its own:Rent Roll · 12 units · 8 leased, 3 vacant · 73% leased · $46,595/mo · next roll Jan 2027If any lease has run past its end date, the card says so in orange. That is the most useful thing a rent roll can tell you, and it is easy to miss on paper.
”Occupancy not stated”
Sometimes the card shows this instead of a percentage. It means CRE Fuel cannot work occupancy out honestly, and it will not print a number it cannot stand behind. This happens when a space is marked as unknown, or when any space has no square footage to measure against — a pad site, a parking area, a cell tower on a ground lease. One unmeasurable space is enough to withhold the figure, and that is deliberate. If your only vacancy is a pad with no square footage, the arithmetic would say the building is 100% leased while a space stands empty.Vacant space belongs in the roll
It is tempting to only enter the leases. Do not. A vacant suite is a row too — the unit number and its size, with the tenant left blank. Without it, the occupancy figure is wrong and the empty space never reaches your Available Spaces list, which is where it turns into work.Free rent is not the same as vacant
If a tenant is inside a free-rent period, enter their rent as 0 and keep the tenant name. The space is leased and occupied, and it counts that way in every figure. Leaving the tenant name blank would mark the suite empty and put it on your available list, where you might market space that is not actually available.Keeping it current
Open the card, click the pencil on any row, change what moved, and save. Rent steps, a renewal, a tenant moving out — all of it is a row edit. When a tenant vacates, clear the tenant name and the lease dates. The suite moves to vacant and appears on Available spaces straight away.Deleting a space removes it from the building and from your available list. If a tenant left but you still want the history, clear the tenant instead of deleting the row.
