If I am losing money on LMHA as a landlord then there should be 10x that number of good people losing their vouchers because they cannot stay in good standing with the excess failures the system has at present. 

They have nothing to stand on at all.

I under stand buying fixers and forcing equity..

Tell him he needs to put $7K in escrow (or however much you stand to make on the deal).Why?

Other ideas that have captured my attention are finding a 4 bed/1.5 bath house that has room to add a stand up shower to make it a proper 4/2. 

Another detail, the fall is always slow, and with the holidays around the corner, expect December to be a stand still.   

are the tenants in good standing or are some behind? 

I stand corrected:)They do have an office in Metro Detroit and while we're far from perfect, we seem to get a lot of their unhappy previous clients.In our opinion, they built a system for Class A rentals - where tenants have 680+ credit scores and rarely have to be evicted or trash properties.They then tried to apply their processes to Class B & C rentals and that's when their service issues increased.All this caused them to recently significantly increase their Flat Fee pricing and monthly minimum charges.

Perform the same task in each app to ensure a fair comparison.Load a property with pictures and details.Market that property.See what your marketing looks like from the public's perspective.Submit a fake application to see how easy the process is.Run a credit/screening report on yourself.Enter a maintenance request, assign a vendor, and attach a fake invoice.Enter charges to the tenant's ledger.Enter recurring charges and automatic late fees.Sign documents electronically.Run owner reports.After testing a few apps, one should clearly stand out.

If you’re planning to hold the property long-term and want to avoid potential roofing issues down the road, I would lean toward the standing seam steel roof.