Absentee Owners?

[E. Jacobs]

I'm going to be buying a list of absentee owners off of listsource soon but I had one question first. Are these properties usually occupied by tenants? If so, this seems like it would have a huge impact on the deal. It will be harder to inspect, the value of the leased fee estate would differ from the value of a fee simple estate, and the tenants would be in the way of rehab work. When you get calls from absentee owners, do they usually call when they don't have tenants and don't want to fix the property up in order to find new ones?