These are a bit better than average though and don't come along every day.

If you just leverage a property based on the availability of 1 tenant but don’t have any reserves for expenses that’s a terrible business plan.

Obviously with this insane inflation things have gotten very expensive. 

For example, I have been informed from a couple of banks that even though my current Airbnb totally offsets the mortgage, they will not take the income from the property towards the DTI calculations but rather take the gross income from the Taxes filed and consider the mortgage amount as an expense, which was hard to understand.

The unfortunate truth about cheap properties is that a hot water heater and a roof still cost about the same as a proprety in a more expensive areas so your repairs/vacancy/capex is going to eat up a larger % of the gross rent than a more expensive property even though the $ might be similar.

TLO is super expensive for individual searches and is still only 50-70% accurate. 

These companies are strictly resellers of some widely available skip trace datasets out there and all they need is average IT guy to set everything up for them to resell the data they buy.  

If so, I might do well to amend those tax returns and take the depreciation and expenses of maintenance and utiilities.

For the Northeast, your average remediation would be between $10,000 - $20,000 for a small scale, but if it's been sitting, it could be worse.Your biggest worries with an oil spill from a tank and remediation are two things:1. is there a water source that it hits.

Seeing as my cousin is NOT a real estate investor (he and his wife were living in one of the units and the maintenance and expenses just became too much of a headache), I'm looking for your help.