Many areas of the market are saturated, preventing much room for rent growth.

I have a property manager who allows the tenants to breach areas of the lease; eg, pets, unauthorized landscaping changes, unnecessary repairs, etc.

To answer your question about occupancy during construction, there is an option in the 203k loan to wrap up to the first 6 months payments into your loan to prevent you paying out of pocket during the rehab.

This is not about Landlords investing wisely; it's about a government that is preventing them from operating their business through nonsensical regulation. 

@Kevin Janssen My initial plan was to completely forbid smoking in the building as well as a specified distance from outside the building (to prevent people from sticking their head out of the window or standing just outside their door) but I hadn't anticipated getting a property with tenants who've been allowed to smoke indoors for years. 

It prevents problems down the road but is also an extra set of eyes for you.

What is preventing you from being one of those people who gets into contract right when one comes on the market?

In my State, Washington, the publicly stated reason for such a law is that it prevents greedy investors from taking advantage of people who are under the stress of property tax foreclosure.

Ok so this may seem really obvious to most people, but I know close to nothing about financing/lending/mortgages. I never learned anything about it in school, never asked my parents, or anything so it's a huge gap in ...

It's just a matter of figuring out how to prevent him from continuing to file for BK.