Most credit reports process quickly, in minutes, with a final credit score and complete tradeline information. Occasionally a report will return with an "N/A" where the score would be, and you may see the message "Not scored due to insufficient credit".

The report may or may not include some tradeline information (a tradeline is the part of the report that goes into detail on each line of credit.)

This "N/A" score is a direct response from the credit bureau. 

Even if an applicant does have some credit history, the requirements for generating a score are quite specific, so it's possible that a score isn't available.

There is a lot of misinformation about what the public popularly calls a "credit score". The reality is that there are many different types of scores that can be pulled and requested as a "credit score", though most consumers only think that it is one thing.

How are scores calculated?

The information the credit bureau uses to generate a score consists of current tradelines (active accounts with financial institutions like credit card companies, debts, mortgages, etc). These tradelines must meet several requirements, including:

1. Must have had an update in the last 6 months
2. Must not be in DISPUTE
3. Must be at least 6 months old

So if the tradelines are too old or inactive, the scoring model does not use them to compute the credit score. This actually makes sense because you wouldn't want out of date information to impact a person's score, or make a decision based on really old information!

In addition, if the tradelines are in dispute, they are disregarded because the credit bureau doesn't yet know if it's an issue with the creditor or the applicant -- basically it's either a negative OR a positive factor for the credit score, but until it's resolved, the credit bureau doesn't know.

If an account isn't old enough, it's just not considered reliable information yet.

Finally, the bureau needs to have a SUFFICIENT amount of valid tradelines in order to render a score.

In the end, the credit bureau is saying that there aren't enough active tradelines in order for them to comfortably make a judgment on the creditworthiness of your applicant.

It's not necessarily a bad thing, but property representatives may want to consider accepting an alternate form of proof of the applicant's creditworthiness. They may consider accepting a guarantor or co-signer.