The home is upside down in value.

@Thomas Hart Getting a real estate website is an powerful tool that allow you to have full control over your brand.

If you ask them to objectively evaluate the condition of the house - say on a scale of 1 to 10 - your start creating doubt in their mind about the value of the house and set the stage for you telling them why you can only offer $X on the property, because there are $20k in repairs that are needed.By asking them where they came up with the number they are using as the value, you set the stage for challenging that belief, without it sounding like you are challenging them.Language is a powerful tool.  

They are amazing tools, in Florida we can hide ownership as well as hide our purchase price if you are going to flip the end buyer doesn't need to see on Zillow you paid 1/2 as much as you are selling it to them for.  

According to analysis by Ben Leybovich you should calculate about $150 - $170 per unit per month for capital expenditures over time (boilers, water heaters, flooring, roofing, siding, etc, etc) for buy & hold properties.If your $600 is missing some of those items you might be in trouble.Hopefully, you've used the BP analysis tools (free!)

If the seller is using the county assessed value then guessing at a price its no wonder its been up for so long, they are not accurate.Get on Zillow, realtor.com, eappraisal, redfin (use the whats my house worth tool) to get a general ballpark of what homes have sold for near by and what these websites think the home is worth.

The 1031 exchange is a a very powerful tool that can be used in a diverse number of ways to leverage your real estate investing career.  

Brent the reason I brought that up is that there's different ways of taking title and there's different kinds of title, strongest title subject to where you actually get a warranty deedThe land contract in Ohio is a great tool to buy on  terms.

Another cool tool to use that my realtor did was to offer one of the tenants money to break their lease early if that's the hold up.

There's never any guarantee, but the Land Trust can be used as an asset protection tool.