DSCR Loans in Miami-Dade County

The condo question comes before the rent question

In Brickell, Edgewater, Downtown, Sunny Isles and along Collins Avenue, the rental you are buying is a unit in a building, and the lender reviews the building before it looks at your ratio. Owner-occupancy share, the budget and reserves, insurance on the structure, litigation, and — since the 2022 safety law — whether the milestone inspection and structural reserve study are done and what they found. Miami-Dade and the City of Miami Beach run their own recertification programs that predate the state law, so an older building here may have a longer paper trail than the same building in Tampa, which helps.

The dues are the other half. Buildings that deferred reserves for years are now funding them, and the monthly figure the lender puts in the payment is the current one, plus any special assessment that has been adopted. A unit whose rent cleared the payment comfortably at the old dues can fall short at the new ones. Pull the budget and the assessment history with the contract, not at the appraisal. A building that fails the lender's review altogether is handled on the non-warrantable condo site's Miami-Dade page.

Where short-term rental income can and cannot be used

Miami Beach's restriction on rentals under six months and a day in most residential districts predates the state's 2011 preemption and is enforced with some of the largest fines in Florida. A DSCR program that counts booking income will not count it there, and a program that uses market rent will ask whether the use is legal. Across the causeway the picture is different: the City of Miami allows vacation rentals in specific zoning districts with a certificate and the state DBPR license, and the unincorporated county permits them with registration and a local responsible party. Edgewater and Brickell condo towers add their own layer — many prohibit rentals under thirty days in the declaration regardless of what the city allows. The order of operations is zoning, then the condo documents, then the lender's rule on booking income.

Foreign-national and ITIN investors

A large share of Miami's rental buyers are citizens of Colombia, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Venezuela or Canada who do not file a U.S. return. A conventional loan has no path for them; a DSCR loan does, because the income test is the property's. Some programs in the market lend to foreign nationals and to ITIN holders with a U.S. bank account, a passport and visa, and a credit reference letter in place of a domestic credit score; the terms are set by each program and differ from the domestic version. The structure of the file — rent, payment, reserves, an LLC if desired — is the same. Say at the start that the borrower is not a U.S. resident; it routes the file to the right program on day one.

Single-family and small multifamily south and west

Kendall, Cutler Bay, Homestead, Hialeah and the Westchester-to-Doral corridor are where Miami-Dade's single-family and duplex-to-fourplex rentals sit, and the files are simpler: no building review, a Form 1007 or 1025 rent schedule, and an insurance quote that depends heavily on roof age and whether the lot sits in a flood zone. Homestead and the Redland carry agricultural and zoning quirks — confirm the parcel is residential before the appraisal is ordered.

Common questions