Focus on absentee owners and start with the ones who live the farthest away and only own one property in the area since they have the least use for the property.You can also drive for dollars, looking for anomalies of disrepair and then look them up in the tax records and use a site like Spokeo to do cheap skip tracing.

A lot of properties in Cleveland are so cheap compared to Vegas that you'll think every deal is amazing.

Or buy a thermal camera to check for heat losses, they have gotten really cheap. 

Choosing a location near LA, accessible by a short flight or drive, will make it easier to check on your projects.

Finding the correct contact info is hard enough, but if your pitch is that they should sell cheap now, you're misreading the market.Multifamily properties are worth significantly less now than they were just a few years ago, and asking for a further discount due to property condition would probably result in a loss, maybe not even pay off the debt.

Chicago is still pretty cheap in comparison. 

I've owned student housing as far as 4.1 miles from the University of South Carolina campus.In my experience, the only reason kids would live that far away is cheap rent.

It's incredible how much you can travel for cheap/free if you learn to point stack and search for flights in advance. 

its cheap  compared to what you get I found a strict foreclosure in Oregon that their site was on the only one tracking it and we made over 300k on that one deal. 

Cheap materials, thin walls, the LVP was peeling already not to mention the transient individuals in the parking lot.