Lease options are the vehicle of choice here, until I sort out how to get to the other side of the ceiling imposed by debt to income ratio.

Floating rate debt is a ticking time bomb on them.  

Leaving the folks to their own devices to figure things out, with empty wallets and full credit cards.

With a DSCR (Debt Service Coverage Ratio) loan, you can tap into your equity and still retain the cash flow since it's based on the property's rental income rather than personal income.

When we did it, we did score some great deals, but what we found was that we were visiting so many properties to understand our "strike price" (the maximimum we would pay for the property when taking into account rehab costs, hold times, interest on any debt, closing costs, real estate commissions, a contingency reserve for "unexpecteds", etc) that the math started to not make as much sense.

Doing a conventional loan for each property is out of the question due to my debt-to-income ratio. 

Just contact a collections agency and send them proof of the debt owed (could be the signed lease agreement or a judgement if you have one).

Remember you are using debt to make this investment, not reserves  sitting in your bank account so I recommend a more conservative investment approach. 

Generally ive offered equity or debt on deals but never on the operations.

I don't think a gift card is necessary at this point, but if you can exchange addresses and phone numbers that would be great.Think like a neighbor....they are going to be worried about parties, noise, trash, etc.