If one person making a remark about vinyl siding is going to turn you off to a particular property, I think you need to take some more time and learn the business a little bit better.I am not saying that to be offensive because every investor goes through the phase of taking others word as gospel and having it influence their investment decisions.Also, it is for reasons like your inspector friend mentioned that you have inspection contingencies in contracts. 

Maybe do a better job at sharing your criteria with applicants up front (either pre-screening over phone or in person) so you dont waste as much time with showings, applications, and running background checks for naught. i.e. felony criminal background, any evictions or landlord court proceedings grounds for disqualification.

-tvs https://www.tenantverification.com/  tvs was the service I'd use to run credit/criminal/eviction checks on prospective tenantsas for the others, a I would track a lot on spreadsheets or databases I keep. for estimating area rents, I wrote an script to pull all of the rent info for my area, parse it all by city/town and in some cases neighborhood name, then use the data on rent, square footage, and number of bedrooms to generate averages and watch trends in the rates for each area. 

I *have* had tenants who said there would be no problems on a criminal background report, then I run it and find, among other things, domestic abuse, theft charges, child endangerment, etc.

This is criminal. 

No offense but this is not correct.

—In all criminal cases, contempt cases, and other cases filed pursuant to this chapter, if a party has sold, leased, or let real estate, the title to which was not in the party when it was offered for sale, lease, or letting, or such party has maintained an office bearing signs that real estate is for sale, lease, or rental thereat, or has advertised real estate for sale, lease, or rental, generally, or describing property, the title to which was not in such party at the time, it shall be a presumption that such party was acting or attempting to act as a real estate broker, and the burden of proof shall be upon him or her to show that he or she was not acting or attempting to act as a broker or sales associate.

Hey Guys,I recently received an application from a potential tenant and ran his credit/criminal history using mysmartmove.com.

To my dismay, the police said I do not have probable cause for a criminal case against him by virtue of the joint venture agreement that I have with him.

I always recommend checking credit, criminal and eviction history.