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Due Diligence & Buying

The listing tells you a story; due diligence tells you the truth. These guides cover the checks that happen between offer and closing — reading the rent roll, surviving the appraisal, pinning down market rent, and inheriting tenants — so the numbers you underwrote are the numbers you get.

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Guides

  • How to read a rent roll: verify a rental's income before you buy (2026)

    A rent roll is where the seller's story meets the leases — and the gap is the deal. Why a fourplex that "grosses $63,600" is really collecting $42,900, how to split the $20,700 gap into curable vacancy ($16,800) and sticky loss-to-lease ($3,900), the five places rent rolls mislead, the GRM that reads 8.2 on potential rent and 12.1 on collected, and the estoppel-and-bank-deposit check that turns the seller's claim into proof before you wire a dime.

    11 min read

  • Investment property appraisals: how they work — and what to do when the value comes in low (2026)

    How investment-property appraisals work: the forms and the rent schedule, the lower-of rule that turns a $228K appraisal on a $240K contract into a $9,000 cash call, worked low-appraisal gap math, and the playbook when the value comes in short.

    11 min read

  • How to estimate rent on a rental property (2026)

    Rent is the input every metric leans on. The appraiser's comp-adjustment method with a worked grid, the GRM and 1% cross-checks that bound the number, the haircut from market to effective rent, and what a $150-a-month rent miss does to cap rate, cash flow and DSCR.

    11 min read

  • Buying a rental property with tenants in place: documents, obligations, and below-market rent math

    A due-diligence framework for a tenant-occupied purchase: verify the leases, payment history, deposits and local successor obligations, then run the in-place rent math. A hypothetical duplex makes $43 a month at the in-place rent against about $313 in the market-rent scenario.

    11 min read

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