This also yields tenants more interested in eventually owning a home ("well, we will need to buy a fridge in 3 years anyways, once our down payment is saved... may as well get it out of the way"), meaning they have plans to move out in 2-3 years, thus auto-solving my problems with rent control.

If you take title you may as well kiss your chances of buying it good bye.

I figure I may as well get my financing pre approved and start making the 20 or 30 offers it's gonna take to find that first winner.

I figure I may as well get my financing pre approved and start making the 20 or 30 offers it's gonna take to find that eventual winner.

I currently have a good deal of leeway, for now at least, of where my money can go.Knowing full well that my lack of recent work history and savings would make it very difficult to get any sort of funding, I thought I may as well starting learning as much as I can.

You will need to exercise your own judgment for this and you may as well use that same judgment to develop your own methodology.

Quote from @Maya Gorski: Obviously, part of the equation will be the price that an investor is able to purchase the property at and when they did so.

An LLC takes about 5 minutes to create (along with getting your federal tax ID) but you may as well save the hassle of taxes and paying the state filing fee until you actually own the property.

My grandmother said I will be stabbed at abandoned houses and that I may as well buy a Beanie Baby collection with my money...they will be worth the same amount of money one day.

I doubt the smells will get much worse so you may as well monetize what you can and if they don't want to pay it then they decided to be out on their own.