Will you tend to be super picky with tenants, or be willing to take the first gamble that meets your qualifications (since they are all truly gambles anyway)?

If you want to gamble with your money, go to Las Vegas.

Hi Darin,I'm in Dripping Springs, and have followed your story and though it sounds like a scary encounter, you seem to have a good attitude through it all, certainly a positive characteristic to keep moving forward.

There is a difference between investing and gambling/speculating.

Essentially gambling that the value of your leveraged assets is going to increase over time.  

Yes, having smaller and more rooms is characteristic of certain older-style homes, but I'm not sure that's what gave it it's classic feeling. 

To me, that's gambling, and while I don't mind gambling on occasion, I don't do it with with my investment money

Nothing has changed.Your choices include:Pulling files yourself and entering the data in a database or Excel filePaying someone else to do the above for youFind a data list provider An alternative to looking for probates is to market for other characteristics and deal with the probates as they come.

That roof job was not cheap.It's up to you if you want to gamble a low ball offer w/o knowing what kinds of sins are underneath that roof and tile.Can you get work done reasonably or will you get held up by high priced contractors?

Some data points we look at are population, population growth/loss, unemployment, crime rate etc.We then filter out the rows with characteristics from those data points that do not fit our criteriaAfter filtering, we order bpos on every row, and that gets returned to us in a massive spreadsheet.We then run some calculations to filter out blatantly bad BPOs and filter out words we don't want like such as "fire", "burned", "demolished" and "razed".Once we have a list of properties we're interested in, we use an excel formula to create a bid amount for each row.We get to pick out the properties we want to bid on in the pools.