In a terrible situation, what should I do?

[Mike Schoeffel]

This is a long and convoluted story, but I'll condense it to the basics. 

I bought my first rental property in Danville earlier this year. The inspection report turned up no issues with the foundation whatsoever. Fast-forward five months. The city inspected the property and found major issues with the joists and joist bands. A contractor gave me a ballpark quote of $30-50K, but said it could end up being much more than that. I don't have that kind of money.

Stack this on top of the fact that my tenants have been terrorizing the neighborhood and stopped paying rent in mid-June and this has been an absolute disaster.

This feels like a worst-case-scenario situation with no good way out. I wanted to get y'all's thoughts on my options. At this point, I'm thinking of taking one of two paths:

1) Attempting to sue the seller or the inspector, though this seems like a drawn out process with little change of success.

2) Selling the house as-is for a major loss. I bought the place for $129K and I'd be surprised if I could even get anywhere close to $50K.

Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

[Tim Hall]

@Mike Schoeffel sorry you’re going through this. Don’t go crazy trying to sue people. The joists don’t effect the livability of the property, right? They didn’t collapse, right? So I’m guessing you’ve got a contractor that’s feeding your anxiety and telling you that the sky is falling. He’s trying to get rich off of you the filthy rich landlord. Personally I would get a engineer over there. My engineer cost me $500-1000. They’ll tell you what you need to do. Then you shop the report to framers who will give you prices. Once the work has been done get the engineers out again and get them to sign off on the work. That’s it. Get the blood suckers out of there and move on.