Identify and define where the risk is and the reward.

So you might want to identify the tax assessor website for any of those where you have an interest in seeking property.

Quote from @Drew Sygit: Hey Drew, what type of things help you identify a good potential tenant? 

Every time a guru “education” course was co pleated, I’d receive 10 -20 phone calls from either investor wannabes “building their team” in preparation for all the real estate “great” deals they were going to uncover or the same wannabes who had already identified a “great” deal (they hadn’t submitted let alone secured acceptance of an offer yet) and were lining up their financing which since they were purchasing at 50% of the value they’d end up with not only 100% financing but also walk away from the closing table with cash in their pocket.  

You can identify the hotspots for crime, school levels, income levels, where there is dilapidated homes, then based on the age and condition of the property gauge where the property stands in class, happy to talk further. 

Identified two properties zoned, for sale and price is right.  

Passive landlord is a long game enter anytime stay for decades and most will do just fine.Active engagement same thing enter anytime and your reward is how hard you work identifying the hot ticket at the time  access to capital etc etc..

If you can’t identify this in the building code it only weakens your case. 

If you identify more than one property but want to only purchase one of them then you can identify that as such on your 45 day list and  have all of your proceeds sent to the closing of the purchase. 

But, once it's made it's made, and your going to get repetitive use out of it, use that will help identify when something that shouldn't happen happened, or when things went better than planned.