Find people who have already trudged through the mud, so you don't have to do so. 

I stick to craigslist only and that's left me with 0 vacancy since I've been doing it, but sometimes it's a close call/undesirable tenants.

I can easily come up with the remainder needed to finish off the mortgage, however, that leaves me in a bit of an undesirable spot.

In order to limit that, I sometimes didn't screen as carefully as I should have and ended up with some undesirable situations that I could have avoided by screening more carefully and tolerating a little more vacancy loss.

If you bought the endorsement "Back of Sewer and Drain" then any backup would be covered. up to that limit in your policy. 12 inches of mud would not be a back up.

Examples of pitfalls include purchasing in an undesirable area, not understanding the market values (vs. list prices), not knowing the rental values (current and market), inheriting bad tenants, buying a lemon, going rogue on renting and management with no contacts / systems / no legal understanding of PA and Municipal landlord-tenant laws, not having trusted resources and contractors in place, using out of state lenders or shaky financing, throwing lipstick on a pig when renovating a house and wondering why it's ARV isn't increasing, tenants are renting, etc.

The point about the "trailer trash" mentality is that it makes it easy to dismiss tenants as undeserving, uneducated, undesirable.  

We have had a few quotes, most cannot just simply mud jack it, but would have to completely re-pour them.

Those might make good rentals...but also there can be extra costs...see if they are in PIDs/PUDs or MUDs that add significant cost to the monthly payment...maybe $100-$200 extra a month.Also $2500 sounds high on rent to me for 1800sqft....I would think more like around $2000/month, but haven't looked in that area lately.I do like Forney....one issue is I don't think there are good demand drivers there. 

It’s clear that the companies dominating this space are keeping the best deals for themselves, leaving only the undesirable properties for the open market.