The blue line indicates 28% which is a common front end DTI cap. 

You never know the motivation, tax delinquency is just an indicator of possible motivation.

Shadow a couple deals of other investors and/or find a mentor at your local REIA or Real Estate Meetup.You could also take a deal to a hard money lender, whether or not they choose to lend to you should be an indication of a good or bad deal.

The short days on market indicates a high level of demand.

You want "access to the money" but you also indicated this money is "100% disposable."

For starters, there's no indication at all that there's a coming downtrend, so if you sold today you could be waiting years. 

Failure to disclose the lease would then fall back to the seller and the seller would be liable for that $5000.So a contract indicating that the property will be delivered vacant is just fine. 

The sellers agent has indicated that seller financing may be an option with a balloon at the end of a 3 year period which would require getting traditional financing and paying the seller back. 

Make sure on the lease that you indicated that appliances were not included.

This was always the largest factor on which GC's I did business with since its a good indicator of how healthy their business is.