But that is not representative of necessity and can be easily mitigated by going with a TK company that is NOT the PM company, as I have done.  

After speaking with the mitigation manager at the remediation company as well as our county's Department of Public Health - Environmental Services department it has been determined that the property is not uninhabitable.  

We have the ability to mitigate these issues.

Once they have this issue, even if mitigated by a licensed contractor, they still must have this disclosed upon sale or transfer.

We are generally very conservative with our projections to mitigate risk. 

Being new to Real Estate Investing, I'd like to mitigate my risk as much as possible out the gate.

Why not ask the owner to call his bank's loss mitigation dept and see if they would do a short sale?  

Further, if I know to expect "bumps in the road" I can at least plan for them and have a checklist in place to mitigate them should they arrive.

Everyone will work with what they have at hand and mitigate risk by running numbers correctly and still come out ahead.

I look at all the comps very closely and in detail, borrower, neighborhood to try to mitigate my risk.