Depending on your definition of cash flow, ie what are you subtracting from the gross rents, expenditure an average of $200 net per unit, which means about 25 units.

Are you saying everyone should drink 800+ calories of sugary beverages a day?   

What I'm concerned about, have the previous owners neglected to keep up with capital expenditure and now dump it on you.

You or  your account may wind up deciding how to classify an expenditure differently after you make is (ie: expense or capital expense)Yes you may accidentally mis-enter the "Class" or forget to enter it but you can run reports latter to quickly scan through as a double check.

Investing requires some expenditure at the beginning.

Another option is to keep the property in your mom's name and formally loan the amount needed to your mom to make necessary capital expenditures, she will only be assessed the additional improvements based on permits pulled to keep it below assessed market value decreasing property taxes. 

If you don't actively participate (meaning approving new tenants, deciding on rental terms, approving expenditures, and similar decisions) your loss would only be deductible against your passive income.See page 3-5 of this pub for more clarification.As with any IRS issue, this is a very clear and understandable issue.

In virtually all cases, the total amount of the judgement is way over the value of the property so the lender can easily win almost every auction with no cash expenditure.  

In theory this allows me to raise new tenants directly to market rent at turn over.As for annual rent increases the only way to go above annual restrictions is through cap expenditures.

Their property may be "projected cashflow positive", but what happens if a big capital expenditure pops up?