While you could do a drive-by and try to get a rough assessment on the external condition of the property, the only way to get information on the inside and within the units is to have an accepted offer and during your due diligence. 

I like townhomes because of their price range in this market, and I like the HOA benefits of external maintenance (when the price is right), but would love to hear pros and cons from anyone who may have dabbled in a similar strategy. 

External obsolesence, pay attention newbies......

I feel like as a RE agent, many of our clients do judge or make assumptions about our success based on the external displays of wealth they can see....the car being the main one.  

@Gary Hall it looks like my post came out far harsher than I intended.

From what I understand, I need to hire an external company (not PG&E) to come install the meters and monitor them. 

Hi there, as someone who currently works in the real estate field as an asset manager overseeing the work of a multi-family property and an external property management company, I do not recommend using your maintenance/construction person as the person who is also the property manager.

No professional business person would voluntarily devalue their investment when there is no external business pressure to do so.If a landlord is not charging market rent and is not giving annual rent increases to insure their increased expenses are being covered by the tenant then they are not a professional landlord.Call them amateur, hobby or what ever you choose but they are not a professional landlord if they choose to supplement a tenants rent for what ever reason they may choose to justify their decisions. 

I also have a backup external hard drive for files/docs that I need to have local access to and am using a cloud based backup system for off-site backup of all my docs.

If your local jurisdiction allows it, I think it is a great business model.Denver, for example, doesn't allow you to add external stairs to a basement.