You have to offer a great product at a competitive price in this market.

In a situation where you were doing an arbitrage (renting it from the owner, then yourself re-renting it to someone else) your costs to renovate/fix it up while you're using it would be able to be capitalized and depreciated by you once your rental was in service (available for rent to others). 

A debt service loan is popular for that step.

The ways around that are to build a business around supporting their voucher and inspection program and spending no small amount of effort ensuring they are smoothly servicing your rentals. 

Ok, Spartan Invest so something similar to RW where it's just aggregated TK services over different areas.

Definitely follow the regulations in the area and if permissible I would offer to attempt to find an acceptable tenant and terminate their lease when that happens but in the meantime they will need to continue to pay.

Offer to buy them a few indoor portable heaters until you find a solution. 

MLS, Made an offer I couldn't refuse How did you finance this deal?

Most brokerages offer zero-fee referral status, so you can still do referral business.

For further context, we are trying to have him be the name on the loan because he would be able to utilize his first time home buyer loan to take advantage of the lowered offered interest rate.