This is a purely personal decision for you on whether you are willing to go to those lengths to secure these tenants or not.The decision on how much you can charge for the damage done is based on what it takes to correct that damage.

You should also budget for management to see how this stacks up as a pure investment.

We just need a truck and a car - purely functional criteria.

I am sure everyone has their take on a pre-approval, my take is a pre-approval is only as good as the loan officer especially when it is issued purely from the loan officer's opinion.Nowadays with a more purchase centric market since refi's have cooled off from may 2013 rate spikes banks are issuing fully underwritten TBD credit approvals which are a different animal.

My name's Josh McNicoll and I'm the first in my family to have not only been bitten by the real estate investing bug but also to have done something about it--my wife and I purchased our first (and so far, only) renta...

I don't think this is a good deal from just pure number perspective. 

Lets say $4,000... that's not a ton of money per "deal"... but man, that's a HUGE mark up on a $6,000 property.So now he's in $10k selling to a fix/flipper... they want to be at 70% of $25,000 or $17,500.So if he bought it for $10k... he has a $7,500 budget for repairs... if you read anything by J Scott, it's hard to do much for less than $15,000... and that's purely cosmetic.  

For me it was purely a business decision.I am a foreign investor and its been a massive learning curve investing in US.

This is pure insanity.

Added to that, it's pure revenue to us, we're way ahead on this deal as we rarely have damage.