I won’t entertain questions that are outlined in my description and I will not show the apartment until an application is filled out.

Repairing something that's broken, depending on what it is, can be something they might be more likely to tell you you don't need a permit for.For example, instead of saying "I'm going to take down several walls and put new ones up" you could say, "I'm going to repair several sections of crumbling plaster by replacing the plaster with drywall, and putting in some insulation in the process" - if that's a fair description of course.It's a minor difference in framing, and might not matter, but where there's ambiguity I usually like to try to tilt things in my favor where possible 😀For tracking down the building department you could Google it or look on ripropinfo.com which is my usual launching-off point for researching properties - it has a column for the city/town website which can be helpful because sometimes towns change their sites from .us to .gov to .com or whatever (more often than you'd expect actually).

I am not an expert in this area, but I presume by your description on your properties that they are currently mortgaged. 

Appraisals depending on the geographic area can slow you down.

@Jeff Schemmel We asked several questions to get the tenant's side of the story and then we looked up the court records and the tenant's description matched what we could find online from the courts.

I am not sure how you came up with your descriptions of my comments to you as they were defensive and not offensive, however if my comments to you felt bullyish, than I apologize.  

The agent that wrote the description clearly embraced this fact.

Recently we've been working to consolidate into tighter geographic areas.  

The apartment is in a good area of Chicago.I've gotten nothing but awful applicants despite being very clear in the description of the property that I'm going to be doing a background check and not accepting tenants with prior evictions or bad credit. 

Based on your description (basement walls collapsing inward), only the foundation would worry me.