Even if the borrower pays off the loan after a few years (refi or sells) then you have a good chance of needing to come up with cash to be able to pay off the underlying loan.I see this strategy as a huge opportunity for scammers to leave their buyer's holding the bag on a property they think they now own but that's in fact still mortgaged.

Evicting someone that old so your daughter can live rent free is a sh$t bag move, and a decision based on the wrong emotion. 

you may want to consider investing then with some of the known top shelf syndicators if you want cash flow real estate. trying to buy low to mid range rentals probably not your bag.. it will be what it is.. inconsistent and for someone like you that is pretty detailed probably not an appropriate investment vehicle there is no real upside.

You're right, it can be a crapshoot in terms of gaining valuable information, but it's just another tool in a note investor's bag. 

If you sell the property you end up "recapturing" some of that depreciation, and recognizing that income as 1245 / 1250 Recapture (Ordinary tax rates) or 1250 Unrecapture (25% maximum federal income tax rate), instead of capital gains (20% maximum federal income tax rate).What is often overlooked as well with this is that the recapture is an interesting mixed bag of a few different pieces. 

For example using bonds assigned as additional collateral or structuring a deal to save the seller taxes thereby giving a better price or terms.While writing this I got a call about someone wanting to sell payments that are received from a court order and my suggestion was not to deal with the scum bag but to loan the money to the payee and assign those payments as collateral with the right of offset, that puts the payee and payor on the hook instead of buying the annuity payments.

There's so much here in Indy going on with investments and really - it's just a perfect mixed bag of SFR for both buy and hold & fix and flip as well multi-family.

I will hunt that mortgage down and bag it!

Me, my father and Uncle (Mr. money bags) are all interested in getting into real estate. 

Still many boarded up houses in the area, but the cat is already out of the bag and prices have significantly jumped up in the last 6 months.