Become the best informed and prepared person in the community.While you are doing this research, you will uncover many opportunities that others do not see.Chasing opportunities in areas where there are many competitors will not yield as good of a return on the investment potential.The best investments and return on investment I ever made was buying land that was mostly ignored by other investors.

Investment Info:

Single-family residence buy & hold investment.

Purchase price: $72,000

Cash invested: $4,000

Owned it for 15 years, mortgage paid-off. Market value is $195,525 (Tax value)

...

I uncover most problems right there.

The second approach is “emerging growth opportunities†where value investors uncover external economic or market activities that are expected to lead to growing opportunities in the long term.

Take sometime to search around the site and see what great information you can uncover.

IF you did not occupy subject you may not have known whatever they uncovered. 

Now if you had a workers comp policy, then you would end up covering any worker you hire; a year end audit would uncover that you had employed workers who did not carry their own coverage and so you would be paying additional premiums for the time (and tasks) that they worked for you!  

Doing proper due diligence will definitely help find some issues that may have been unforeseen, but I don't think there is a way to uncover every little thing and do a full transfer of knowledge from the seller to the buyer (especially if it's been with the seller for a while).

If they are injured and claim Workers Compensation (yes it happened), you could end up with an uncovered loss.

I agree with the earlier posted advice of narrowing to a few cities and then digging deep to uncover the one you believe in the most.