The projected rental income wouldn't cover the mortgage and HOA at this time.

With the situation you're going through, your first thought was likely "I'll raise the rents to cover this." 

Do you have any equity in you existing home (if you own it) so you can leverage a HELOC to use as an emergency fund?

Here's a good article about current inventory versus pre-Covid.

Since you only have 2 full time and two part time staff, who covers their vacations and sick time?   

Take the toilet out without damaging it, put a sanitary cover over waste hole, put toilet on shower floor.

We found it on a platform called Pre-REO.

At this point, instead of continuing to pay the interest loan payments on properties that we will never be able to financially finish since the rehab loans will not cover the actual cost of the rehab, I wanted to know the ramifications of returning the properties to the loan servicer, deed in lieu.

So when I'm reviewing screening reports for my rentals, I like to find out the story behind an eviction - I've had good tenants with evictions on their records who never bothered to expunge their eviction from the record when they had a prior vindictive landlord (yes, such landlords do exist and give the rest of us a bad name). 

My business partner provided the upfront cash for the down payment, and we used hard money to cover the remainder and the rehab costs.