Is it normal to have to do significant repair for buy and hold?

[Brian Garrett]

My wife and I have slowly been creeping towards getting into our first multi-family buy/hold property in the Kansas City Missouri  area.  We've got a great realtor working with us - she's tenacious and detail oriented.  She gets onto the property when she can and provides us a great number of detailed photos of the things she finds that may be issues with the property.  I have concerns that we're wearing out our welcome as we keep seeming to pick properties that, while on the surface look great, need a great deal of work to make them in my opinion habitable.  

The recent pick was a nice looking 4-door unit.  Decent location, nice street presence.  Upon deeper investigation by our realtor pretty much all the bathrooms need to be gutted and redone because all of them have mold and/or clear water damage.  There's photos of what appears to be definite termite issues and other water damage from the ceiling.  Windows are likely painted shut as well.

My first thought was to offer $60k less than the $360k asking price because there's clearly going to be some work to be done.  Doing this remotely (from Denver) I'd need a good GC in the area to oversee the work and the $60k delta between asking and offering seems about right to make sure I don't have someone go in, pull up the shower/floor and and find out joists need to be replaced or something else worse that would seriously skew the price.  We'd also have some carrying costs to deal with as well with the vacant units were being repaired.

Using the Rental tool here on the site, the numbers are sane and should cash-flow about $9k to $10k annually at a $360k asking price, so that part checks out.  If I rehab the units I should be able to raise the rents on the remaining units to bring the returns up to the $10k returns.

Of course the same day we get this information a wholesale house opened up down the street from where I live in Denver at a good price and I can do all the work myself (which I can do) and needs FAR less work.  We have cash to do the wholesale deal without stretching the budget.

 I've expressed my gratitude to the realtor working with us as I know she's putting in a lot of work to get us over the finish line.  I just don't want to wear out my welcome.

I guess my question is - am I asking too much to find a property that would be a little closer to being able to buy/hold in the area or in general?  Thoughts/feedback is appreciated.