Go to Zillow, HAR or any other property listing site and look at each listing. 

I found a house that will be up for auction this week, and it popped up on HAR last Thursday.

Interesting that the HAR listing comment says off-duty cop there frequently... not a great sign of what's going on, but at least it seems they're trying to address the issue.https://www.trulia.com/p/tx/houston/12627-ashford-...

If you're looking more for SFH, I'm not sure but I'd just scour HAR on your own. 

Fsbos typically have a hars time appraising regardless of price, so expect a low appraisal and have a plan to deal with it 

Both of these areas will be difficult to harness cheap deals, but there are pockets of reasonable  and creative deals. 

I began to try to harness some of my "how to win friends and influence people" dogma and told him that I could possibly provide him with a completely passive income stream that would allow him to move to Florida without any of the active burden that landlording required.

I'd recommend checking HAR for something you want. 

Zillow (HAR doesn't support unfortunately) keyword searches such as AirBNB, Mother-in-law, garage apartment, rental income, etc can find you neat propertiesLook into the financials of buying and subdividing land (it's lucrative - why do you think so many developers do this?)

Houston Real Estate Highlights in August(* asterisk denotes that the “Harvey effect” has been removed): Single-family home sales rose 7.6 percent year-over-year, with 5,844 units sold*;Days on Market (DOM) for single-family homes declined slightly to 49 days;Total property sales jumped 36.8 percent, with 9,978 units sold;Total dollar volume increased 40.1 percent to $2.86 billion;The single-family home median price rose 3.0 percent to $236,870, reaching an August high;The single-family home average price also achieved an August record, rising 1.9 percent to $300,670;Single-family homes months of inventory was at a 4.1-months supply, down from 4.3 months last August and equal to the national level;Townhome/condominium sales rose 12.3 percent year-over-year, with 457 units sold in 2018 compared to 407 one year earlier*;Leases of single-family homes rose 7.6 percent with the average rent up 3.4 percent to $1,926*;Volume of townhome/condominium leases fell 8.6 percent with the average rent up 5.5 percent to $1,639*HAR https://www.har.com/content/newsroom?