Although this is technically inaccurate (I saw a case where a sheriff sale of this sort was challenged and the challenge lawsuit took 11 months, deed recording came after that), that is the typical practical waiting period to get the title insurance for the resale.Whatever the mortgage balance, that’s now your obligation to get paid off; before even bidding on any sheriff sale property you should have a good idea of any remaining mortgage balance(s).

We don't need income docs or anything of that sort and our rates are competitive with banks. 

While the wealth of knowledge and experience on BiggerPockets is wide and deep, I would not trust a decision like this to the internet, I would ask you CPA and if you do not have one find one who specializes in this sort of thing.

Ideally I keep the relationship with the utility companies and then the tenants pay me their split.My two concerns though are that this is not legal and that tenants wouldn't be willing to do this sort of ad hoc split.

I favor metro areas having to have at least some sort of permit to operate. 

You gave him a signature loan or business loan of some sort and he ran off on you? 

It looks like those loans require 20% down, and I've been guided as a sort of philosophy, to use as little down as I can do that I can deploy more capital into other projects. 

If you already have taxes sorted then Stessa is also one to explore. 

Denver is an attractive metro for a few reasons, so I downloaded monthly price and rent growth at the zip code level from Zillow’s public housing data.I then used a ranking algorithm to sort the top 10 zip codes for investing based on monthly average price growth and monthly average rent growth (both by percent growth), from 2019-2024.

And you'd have to maintain a primary residence of some sort somewhere.