You need to take another trip down there and inspect.

Actually, we mostly have just been closing on them ourselves to whole-tale, i.e. paying 10k for the lot, and then putting them on the market with good marketing material, since we can usually achieve a higher price if we have some time, instead of tripping over ourselves during a 2-to-4 week escrow to find a land buyer. 

A single day of round trip is $400-800, on a $10k+ investment that is money well spent.

Then, there was a breaker box issue that was causing the breaker box to keep tripping. 

I'm not doing that for a free fishing trip, when most homes in my market sell 5-25%....and there is not one that sold for more than 10% off in the worst condition in the past year.Might sound harsh, but people remember the 1980s where you could bargain on car prices and homes. 

1) Ask OPEN-ended questions, so they have to prove they know the answers2) You can lookup who the owner is in public records and trip them up with that. 3) You can also use whitepages.com to verify owners of phone numbers.

They can take a family trip to the local gas station or visit a friend/relative, which is probably how you handled it.Don't be so quick to compensate tenants when it's an ordinary inconvenience that everyone experiences, even homeowners.

You want to make sure you don't trip any mortgage fraud claims if you are being dishonest about your purchases with the lender.

So, before you get into a boat on a trip to the islands, you do certain things, right?

You should get a Calendly or other online scheduling system up ASAP and direct all persons to there to self-schedule and post a deposit for service, like $150 to cover the trip-charge at minimum.