Do DSCR loans qualify if purchasing through 1031 w/debt-carry-forward requirements?

One thing to be careful with though is that if you go the personal loan route, you need to ensure your DTI is still fine and you will still qualify for your VA loan assumption AND the second mortgage.

I have not thought of using DTI instead of 3x the monthly rental amount in order to qualify an applicants income, but you made a great point regarding the priority that tenants might give a car payment.

At the beginning, it may be difficult to get a more expensive property that will appreciate well and so your choice is go with the cheaper property and get cash flow until you can sell and upgrade, or wait for a really good deal which you may be waiting for quite a while and its possible that you will have spent so much time waiting that you could have purchased multiple cash flowing properties by the time you get a good appreciation deal that you can qualify for / refinance after the rehab. i know anyone can go out and get seller financing deals, HML, flip to build capital or whatever the case may be I am just saying sometimes those will be harder and could result in less deals overall. 

You don't want them to just be financially qualified but you failed to investigate how they treated their past two apartments. 

The rules are more complicated than your one sentence, and even Tom did not have the time to explain all of them on his podcast. 500 hours is one way to qualify for material  participation, and there are other ways.

If you don’t have a large down payment saved up, don’t worry—there are plenty of options available . . .”A trusted lender will go over the various loan types with you, any down payment requirements on those, and down payment assistance programs you may qualify for.

Now if you could prove they were purposely steering qualified candidates to other units, or failing to market the unit at all, those would possibly be acts of fraud or gross negligence, which can be litigated. 

Would I still be able to qualify for this?

With some additions, this would qualify for the OMG category, but I think they didn't have that category back then when it was on the market.