People who refuse to make the capital investment necessary to maintain a decent environment need to find other ways to make money. 

However, you will have maintain residency in the home for the life of the loan.

@Carrie Torrey I also recommend getting someone to maintain your books and can communicate efficiently with your CPA.

They want me to be in charge of maintaining the parking lot, the structure, and exterior.

He ultimately wants to maintain & manage our rental (and any future rentals) but will initially have large gaps in his schedule to fill with paying work once we arrive.

Glad to see you both were able to maintain your relationship and learned from this deal.

I know that we can maintain our current direct mail budget for quite a while at the rate that we are mailing, but I don't want to increase it until we realize some profits to invest into more marketing. 

If you only do one deal per year, your commission will pay for all the fees related to maintaining your license.  

I think the crux of the issue is how well the tenant maintains the home.  

In New Jersey, for 3 family buildings and up, both the state and the city are involved (the state does a multiple dwelling inspection every 5 years, the city maintains its own, not necessarily consistent, records of how many units a building has).