Assuming these are for short-term loans, such as for flips, @Keith Groshans, you could do what we do and let the borrower keep the money and pay everything when they sell the property.

@Jason Munns, are you looking to buy investment properties in the U.S. or Canada?

Buy Texas offlist property tax properties for $8,000 and sale for $200,000 just mowing the grass

I could tell by the list price and look of the property whether it was going to go pending, or languish. 

A high property tax rate will increase the taxes more quickly as a percentage of total expenses when the property value increases.

Do the math and see if an ADU is worth the cost and effort.https://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/rental-property-cash-flow... 

The assets I see them actually acquire do not correlate to the money they've raised. 

Once the news came out, he flew to Indy to check on the properties and found out they were actually vacant, unoccupied and had never been remodeled like he had been told that they were.

Focus on absentee owners and start with the ones who live the farthest away and only own one property in the area since they have the least use for the property.You can also drive for dollars, looking for anomalies of disrepair and then look them up in the tax records and use a site like Spokeo to do cheap skip tracing.