For example if you grew up in Hopkins you would likely know every part of the city and whats improving and declining.Your market is the twin cities area and the demand for rental housing, price to rents, and future trends.You need to know your city and what they expect from landlords and the costs involved in compliance.Neighborhoods are not the same block by block some have good demand blocks and others have undesirable blocks.Knowing your block would be understanding that the houses in a certain part of the neighborhood are In high demand because of the walking trail, proximity to transportation, or a school boundary, planned light rail, etc.

I used to get undesired tenants out by raising the rent significantly above market as soon I wanted. 

A 300% jump now is undesirable. 

If you try to rent at this current time you may get a more undesirable tenant.

I was already dirty so I inspected the crawl space and some other undesirables for myself.

Recent trends look okay, but more than likely there’s something further back that made the neighborhood undesirable.

Also, I am concerned that not getting a great deal on a property or financing here could leave me with an undesirable debt to income ratio when I am at the next duty station.If there is anyone that has past experience with this situation, or has worked with someone in my shoes and could provide guidance so I can get started on the right foot , I would appreciate it.

Using the filter function you can start deleting undesirable properties based on the numbers to get the list down to a manageable size.If there is no value in the building column then you are likely looking at vacant land.There should be a code in one column that tells you if a property is a house, mobile home lot, multifamily, store etc.I spend a lot of time narrowing down my list, then I look up what they look like online to eliminate more, then I drive by every property that I might bid on.I do this myself, I don't trust a VA for this work as I am spending a bunch of money and one mistake on a property could cost many thousands of dollars.

I'm only able to look at 1-2 unit properties but the high mortgage insurance makes it undesirable when compared to other loan products.  5% downpayment allows for me to eliminate mortgage insurance after 11 years but I think I'll only be in the property for 2-4 years.Fannie Mae - They seem to have a lot of products including a down payment assistance with zero interest. 

If that's not you then I would suggest that overkilling the presentation on a used product, you may be actually trying to pull a "slight of photo" move to draw attention away from something undesirable.