Also, most states require applicants to be at least 18 years or older - D.C. is 18 or older.Some states also require agents to complete pre-licensing courses or programs.

Increase income required to 2.75 or 3x the rent will shed lots of applicants who typically struggle hand-to-mouth or under the table income; just be prepared for higher vacancy expenses.

Would I start by Google-ing 'private lenders' and submit applications or is there a more effective method to locate financing?

This is going to be a D neighborhood, in my opinion.From our experience, you can rent a house in these neighborhoods fairly quickly (average 3/4 weeks) as long as you don't have a product or price issue.Product - your house needs to be in good conditionPrice - you should be asking for market rentIf either one of these is off, you will either have little to no showings (price issue), or you will have people look but not fill out applications (product issue).Best of luck to you!

I just found Tenant Cloud and like that you can customize the online rental application, have your own little made up website that you can point applicants to for listings, create your listings from their site which propagate out to the major sites (Zillow,Realtor, etc) (although I found that the listing description has character limitations), and track income/expenses for free.

I am a new landlord with my first application.

This isn't talked about very often and is a great strategy when it is applicable.  

Screening company, RHR, came back with the applicant's report and there is no rental history.  

When a landlord begins to look for a tenant with less than a month to occupancy the quality of applicants drops drastically.

(b) Conditional use conversion — authorized. (1) (i) In all districts except the R-2, R-4, R-5, and R-6, the Board may authorize, as a conditional use, the conversion of a building for use by more than 1 family, as long as the number of dwelling and efficiency units to be allowed conforms with the applicable principal-permitted-use bulk regulations for the district in which the building is located.