At what point you say No to the deal? 10+ yrs house vacant

[Duy Nguyen]

BP Community, 

First real estate related question here. I had found an abandon property that may have been vacant for roughly 10+ years or even more according to the neighbor. The outside looks terrible and I am pretty sure the inside will be about the same condition or worse. I am in the process of locating the owner and talk to him about selling the house. Here are my questions:

1. I use land glide to locate the property owner information, and all I find is the owner's mailing address at this house (owner occupied but the owner is not living in there). I am in Houston and i use hcad to get this information. Where else can I find this owner contact info?

2. My purpose is to hold and rent, at what point do you think this property is too much to fix? Hence you have to do a rebuild instead of remodeling. I had listened to podcasts and I think in one of them, they were saying about the structure of the house was damaged to the point that they have to replace the structure. Having a property being vacant for this long, I can only imagine that everything has to be fixed and I am not sure if the cost of fixing it is as much as the cost of building an entire house. 

3. Hard money lending: For a newbie just getting started, do you need to present a deal to the lender before they can lend you money? If you have a recommendation, please feel free to drop their names here. 

Thanks all for your inputs. Getting started here and hopefully I can close a deal in 90 days.