Ended up tearing off the entire roof and rebuilding it from scratch, it was caving in on the front of the house and sagging throughout. 

depending on the type of insurance you want, you could lower your rate by going with a lower cash value replacement rather than insuring at full rebuild cost.

I just moved back to my home town and in the process of rebuilding my consulting business in Al, Ga, and Fl.I’ve always had a passion for investing & trading the markets (Futures, Forex, and Options) and I would like to learn how to best merge the worlds of income trading and RE investing.

I'll hold on to them and rent them as long as it takes to get a big enough chunk of them, and then start tearing them down and rebuilding nicer, high efficiency houses.In your case, I'd go knock on the owner's door and see what he says!

Tear out the existing slab and start over completely, or try to rebuild the same house that was previously there.  

Really, it's running on WordPress and for $5 per month you can get a host that will host WordPress and it is pretty easy to set up and configure yourself and there is a lot of free information online about that.I'm a developer by trade myself, and am currently offering small projects for free and larger ones pretty cheap in order to rebuild my portfolio and get back into freelancing.

You can rebuild capital to deploy again after 6 months to 1 year to buy more properties.

From my experience, the majority seem to be people in a "transitional" life stage, (i.e. empty nesters, students, newlyweds, just graduated, relocated for job, etc.) as Michael mentioned.Also, as Chad touched on, with the general population having massive student loan debt, general spending debt, or those who are still recouping after the recession, renting allows them the time to build/re-build credit, savings, etc.

But you're a good customer - how about a rebuild?

I think it is a great stop to do some building whether for rental market or sales market and an investor can feel good about what they are doing helping rebuild a neighborhood.