I like this route because I can see their body language, and its easier to gauge the tone of their voice.

Is this a really high crime area where the police just collect the bodies?

But I do want to take this seriously as I don’t plan on scaling skyscrapers and beating my body to death until I’m 60 years old.

I will keep that in mind when investing near a body of water, I'm sure there is some kind of insurance to cover hurricane damage?

One tenant was on a month to month and the place was filthy and smelled and in dire need of work.

HOA in theory can remove free rider market failure if well managed, when there are costs and/or needs for management shared by all.HOA kind of philosophically touches on the oft debated (and oft oversimplified) ideological debate between centralization or decentralization of authorityMy thesis would be: I suspect that HOA developments have higher property values in general, however when controlled for development budget on a per home basis, I would wonder if this actually holds up over time.I have heard anecdotal stories of corruption within HOA bodies, and mismanagement. 

We're nearing the end of our due diligence period, so I wanted to double check that we weren't getting ourselves into a mess before our money goes hard.I also wasn't sure whether to have the current owner fill the units, as I've heard horror stories about owners just filling the units with warm bodies in order to show the higher occupancy on paper, when in fact, they turn out to be not the best tenants.All that being said, I absolutely agree that this is a glass half full situation, as we will get to push those rents sooner than expected.

I mean in my fundings  we are 180 days on average and these are professional flippers.. and I do 100 plus a year of them so I have a pretty good body of work to run averages on. 

Operating agreements can be large and important details can get buried within the body of the text.

Not that we allow smoking of any kind in our units, but tenants break rules, and I've never had a problem with lingering weed smoke, whereas cigarettes can seriously harm a unit to point you need to put thousands of dollars into remediating the smell.