You have to identify what your goals are and set parameters that get you to that goal.

I'm looking to make the transition from residential to commercial investing and think I've identified an opportunity with a restaurant space in a pretty attractive area. 

You need to identify the cost of each scenario and see which one causes you to incur the smallest loss. 

If you want to do it yourself, you may be able to do it online, but it would take a bit of time looking through a long list to identify the foreclosures.

Just easy to identify you if they’re janky.

I haven't found a property that I like to invest yet, but I want to identify the lenders, get pre-approved and get all the paperwork done and out of the way.

When I checked in with my accountant a few months ago, she was confident that property tax on what was clearly identified as an investment property could be deducted on a schedule E.  

Hard to really get into this without any specific details related to the financials regarding each house, but I’d start here...If you need some liquidity, I’d run the cap rates on all my rentals and identify the bottom 3 producing rentals.

High cash flow  ( I E identified as cash flow with 20% down )  as we know everything cash flows if you pay cash.and high appreciation rarely go together.. and % appreciation  you have to be careful with.. some folks can say hey my market appreciated 50% last year or last 5 years but the house went from 20k to 30k.. that's 50%  or you can buy in SF for 1 million and those appreciated 50% and went from 1 mil to the current 1.6 mil median SF home price.. trying to find this unicorn will cause some paralysis on your end if you get to literal about it.if your going out of state  AS @Brian Ploszay stated the people working for you in the market place are NUMBER 1 concern.. stats don't matter if you PM is not working right or your units get trashed  or what have you.

He started out as the assistant manager of trim and became the  VP of Operations for a well known National  I have identified several small lots and a few larger pieces the value is mind blowing.