Is the owner in violation of any city ordinances or building codes?

Have your realtor check to see what Condo's sold for in the last year; in my area I can go onto the internet and ask the question of what houses sold for in a particular zip code and get the answer.

But it requires that you know how to understand/write code a bit.

While everyone is pointing out various facts regarding various state tax codes. 

It gets betterThe house has daily fines accruing for code violations: Retaining wall needs repair, and needs to be scraped and painted to make the fines go away.

Actually this is cheap alternatives for old fashioned short code texting.

You put in zip code for area to get approximate material and labor cost..This helps me keep things in perspective.

I call him and he gave a new code to get into.

Your insurance company is on the hook to rebuild/repair the property to current code if there's damage.

But, if the two houses aer non conforming as to current code, you probably could not rebuild.