You're going to be terrible at it at first but by the time you are talking to your 10th-15th company you'll have figured out how to talk to them.Talk to real estate agents.

Nothing so terrible that its a vacant building, but basically a place where the market has improved over the past 10 years but the landlord is still renting at the same C class neighborhood grade.

Terrible divorce with children and a house.

We put it in our properties, and water damage happens very easily with bubbling and it looks terrible quickly.

It costs about $20 a foot so it's not terribly more than their prefab stuff.  

One issue is the bad folks out there that will buy these terrible properties and them sell them to un suspecting forigners who then get blamed for not maintaining their props.. when in fact they got swindled... :) but when your talking about 20 to 30k houses being over priced and no value then your talking about the worse of the worse in housing stock.. and I am sure these are ghetto type locations. or war zones.

It's not terribly hard to do so but there are many steps.Your question about raising money may not be necessary depending on how much working capital you have to start with.

If it's a cash flowing 20 unit building in NYC then it's a terrible rate.

Hey guys, I'm an aspiring investor with a good salary, ample savings, but terrible (sub 600) credit.

Cali and New York City are good examples of terrible places for buy and hold.