The owner lives in Australia, is tired of landlording and just wants to sell.  

there is a famous case  ( at least in Australia were US and AU marketers were truly abusing investors from AU) AU investor did exactly what you did.. bought a unit... decided to take his 6 week vacation to Detroit and do the work himself.  

Back in Australia, I bought land when I was 22, I used the loan as a forced savings account, put everything to it, should have built on the land (prestige estate, but didn't want the extra debt.So I held for 5 years and was only just able to offload it albeit @20% more than I paid...4% a year, loan was locked in @8.75%, a term deposit with the bank would have yielded 6%.

For example, my clients are in North Carolina, New York, Arizona, Connecticut - even Australia!  

I do deals in the USA all the way from Australia because I get to deal with honest ethical professionals.

In Australia, if a property is listed at $600K, you wouldn't dream of offering less than, say, $550K.

I'm planning on buying multi-family property in the USA; in fact I'm in the USA right now, having a lot of fun learning about your property market.I would like to accept rent payments via direct deposit to my bank account, whereby tenants just tell the bank to transfer the money directly to my account on the 28th of every month, or whatever date has been agreed, OR transfer manually using online banking.In my native Australia, this is the only way that tenants can pay rent for most rental properties; cash and cheques - sorry, checks - simply aren't accepted.

This was in Australia and I don't know Australian lending laws but he probably didn't take no for an answer.

I come to the US by way of Sydney, Australia and London, UK and my wife is a US native.

Here in Australia we have a site called airtasker.com.