26 million Americans have no credit score at all. Someone who landed last month from Bogotá or São Paulo has less than that: a file that does not exist yet. Here is what we read instead.
Because a US credit file only begins when a US lender starts reporting on you, and nothing you built elsewhere is imported. 26 million people here have no score at all. Someone who landed last year has less than that: a record that has not opened yet.
That absence is not a warning sign. Roughly 19 million more people have a file too thin to score at all — too few accounts, too short a history, nothing a model can read. It does not mean they pay late. It means the system has not watched them long enough to hold an opinion, and the application form has no box for that distinction.
It matters more here than almost anywhere else. 54.5% of Miami-Dade residents were born outside the United States, around 1.49 million people, and every one of them crossed a border that credit does not cross. A mortgage paid off in Bogotá, a decade of rent paid on time in São Paulo, a company banked for years in Caracas: none of it lands with you at the airport.
Strip the form down and three questions hold it up: is this person who they say they are, does money arrive regularly, and is there enough of it. A score is only a shortcut to all three at once. When the shortcut is missing, the answers still exist — they are in bank statements, contracts, tax returns and transfer histories, in whatever currency they happen to be written.
Which is why what you send matters more than what you lack. 84% of rental operators saw falsified pay stubs last year, and the screening that followed lands hardest on the honest self-employed. Documents that agree with each other — same name, same amounts, twelve months deep — do more for you than any single impressive figure sitting on its own.
You are not asking anyone to make an exception. You are asking to be read on evidence that exists, instead of on a record nobody has written yet.
Sources: RentCafe (Miami rental competition and occupancy, 2025); U.S. Census Bureau, ACS 2020-24 (Miami-Dade demographics and rents); CFPB (credit invisibility).
Passport, visa or US ID. An ITIN works. A Social Security number is not the gate here, and never having had one is not a strike against you.
Offer letter, contracts, invoices, 1099s, tax returns. If your income is real, there is a way to show it that does not require a W-2 pay stub.
Bank statements, American or foreign. Savings, assets and income generated outside the United States are part of the picture, not a footnote to it.
The unit, the rent, the lease dates. That is the last piece. No letter from a relative, no co-signer, no explaining your family to a stranger.
A thin file is not a bad file. It is a short one — and length is not character.
Send the pattern. One month of statements proves nothing. Twelve months of the same money arriving on roughly the same dates is the strongest document most people already own.
Match every name. Passport, application, bank account and tax return should carry the same spelling. A mismatch reads as a problem long before anyone thinks to ask you about it.
Build it once. A file you assemble properly the first time is the file you reuse for the next unit, the next lease and the next renewal, instead of starting over each time.
Everything that shows money arriving and money staying: invoices, client contracts, 1099s, tax returns, business and personal statements. Miami is the wrong city in which to treat a W-2 as the only acceptable proof of an income.
This is not an edge case here. Miami-Fort Lauderdale has the highest self-employment rate of any large US metro, 15.8%, roughly 468,000 people, and the city starts more than 4,000 businesses per 100,000 residents, three times the national rate. Miami runs on 1099s and small companies, while the screening form still assumes one salary from one employer.
Order it the way a stranger would read it: who you are, what you do, what came in each month for the last twelve, and what is in the account today. Put the weakest part in plain sight with its explanation attached — a gap between contracts, a recent move, a company opened this year — because an unexplained hole gets filled in with the worst assumption available.
Rent Protection sits at exactly that weak point. It is documented backing behind the rent, presented together with your application, so the owner weighs a file that has already answered its hardest question. It replaces nobody's screening and it never promises a yes: the owner decides, and the building's board — the condo board that screens the tenant separately from the landlord — decides on its own.
Yes. Income earned abroad is still income. What matters is that it is documented and recurring: contracts, statements, transfers. A salary in euros or reais is not a problem to be excused, it is evidence to be read.
Invoices, client contracts, 1099s, business bank statements and your last tax return. Miami-Fort Lauderdale has the highest self-employment rate of any big US metro at 15.8%, and the screening form still pretends otherwise.
Send what you have first. Legibility matters more than formality: a clear statement in Spanish or Portuguese is more useful than a perfect translation that arrives two weeks late, when the unit is already gone.
Not to be verified by us. Identity can be documented with a passport, a visa, an ITIN or a consular ID, and that is what we work from. What we cannot tell you is what a particular building will ask for on its own form, so make that your first question, before you pay anything.
Recent enough to describe your life now. Bank statements from the last 60 to 90 days, your most recent tax return, a current work or client contract, and identity documents that have not expired. An old statement is not dishonest — it is simply unreadable as proof of what you earn today.
Not to be verified, but open one as early as you can anyway. It is where the rent will be paid from, and it starts the US paper trail you do not have yet. Every month of ordinary activity in it — salary in, rent out, bills paid — is history you are building while you look for the apartment.
One conversation, no commitment and no paperwork. Tell us where your rental stands today and we will show you exactly what changes on your side of the table.
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