Keep your eyes wide open to strike quickly (have financing ready, etc.) if a deal pops up, look for problem properties (or owners who need help), properties that have been on the market "too long" (they could simply be overpriced but sometimes there are more benign reasons) but buyers (and agents) won't look at them because they've been on the market so long.As to location, I won't speak to investing in another distant area of the country. 

I don't know about WA but in MA there is always an owner of the real estate and title passes at the moment of death to someone, even a distant cousin. 

My distant great aunt owns 2 acres of land in a somewhat suburbanish area.

I am also considering of starting a business in which distant investors can contact me on buys they want to make and not know if the property is worth the price they are paying or the condition of the property?   

This is a distant property so they are paying a property manager $50/mo. 

There are lots of people out there who market distant deals that look good through the eyes of someone who's in a different market, but would be immediately rejected by a local buyer.

Anecdotally, I encountered a bunch of folks from after the crash who lost everything because they over-leveraged AND they moved their equity to distant markets that they didn't understand.

  $450k could be a tear down in certain areas...You have one strike against you in being a distant investor, it has been hard to fine flip properties in any market on the MLS so you may want to fine tune the areas you are interested and try off market methods of finding property.  

So it really much harder to make that happen.If you do want to look at out-of-state options I'd see where your friends have moved, if you have a distant cousin somewhere, etc.  

I think investing locally is better (in general), but if the returns and margins make sense and you're up for it then diversify and venture to distant lands.