I can’t give condos away and many investors are under water as they either re-financed, took out a reverse mortgage or had non/paying tenants carried over from the COVID moratorium.  

Seller was behind on pay HOA payments and in risk for losing the property.

Selling to you could begin to feel like an appealing alternative to dealing with the hassle of re-renting the home.If they’re open to selling, you can share what you’d be willing to pay based on your research and pre-approval.

When you pay off a mortgage you pay the interest for all the years you didn't own the house?!?

Use that loan to pay the back taxes and get things under control.

Now, you need to figure out how to find deals and pay for them.

There are quite a number of things that can make utilizing an FHA loan more difficult such as more barriers during appraisal, appearance of low qualification/little cash, typically longer closing period, likely higher interest rate, and PMI cannot be dropped without a refinance if 3.5% down.That said, just chain 5% down conventional loans, and make sure your duplexes pay for themselves.  

I would focus on the house hack and not take a pay cut.

Our tenants pay $2,700 in rent and the mortgage+fees comes out to $2,360.

Once the work was complete, I refinanced to pay off the hard money loan and held the property as a long-term asset.This duplex also marked the start of my short-term rental journey—we ran our first Airbnb from one of the apartments before scaling to bigger projects.