Please let me know also what credit union you used.

The upside is that there is no lien on the property.If you have the ability to do a refinance after a seasoning period, and the house is worth more than you paid for it, consider doing that and pulling out all your capital.If you use a smaller credit union, some will bundle multiple small properties into one blanket loan. 

With one of them, who applied, it ended up with him asking me to prove I owned the property and going over the lease with a fine-toothed comb (after he missed a couple of deadlines to get things back to me, I moved on and denied him).I figured the facts that 1) prospective tenants see the property and can talk with the current tenants to ask about the property and me, and 2) that they have to submit an application and go through a credit and background check, and 3) that I was using Cozy to collect payments and 4) that I am available by phone, email and text whenever they want, would be enough to make people comfortable that they are not getting scammed, but it was apparently not enough for some people.Does anyone have any tips to help prospective tenants feel more comfortable dealing with you from afar and not feeling like they are getting scammed?

We reach out at multiple times throughout the redemption period, all the way to the end.Part of me is beginning to think that foreclosure is such a touchy subject to many people, that many would rather just ignore taking any action, and just let the property go, even though our "cash for keys" and offers to list their properties give them a chance to make something good out of a bad situation.Conversely,  somewhat seasoned marketer in me wants to stay the course, and keep altering our message until we improve our response rates; after-all, people have been successfully marketing to people in foreclosure and pre-foreclosure for years, which makes me think there is hope to ramp-up response rates.Sorry for all the text, I'm thinking out loud a bit here.Has anyone had any success marketing to mortgagors during the redemption period?  

Landlord does not report our on time payments to build our credit.

My objective is to move the building in the other direction with improvements and rent increases to get higher quality tenants.    

My wife does not work and we have a good amount of "stupid" debt (credit cards/hospital bills/student loans) and not very much in savings and fair credit.

if not, that's a good way to go.Offer your time / skills / credit?

3 BR/1 bath asking $170k.Taxes are $9,062 (although I saw at least one other figure on a different website, I went with the highest)Here are my assumptions:closing costs - $4,000rehab/initial improvements - $5,000 (this is a blind guess because there are no pictures of the inside available, but let's not focus on this number right now...)Rent - $2,000vacancy - 8% ($160/month)property management - 8% (the calculator I used (downloaded from BP) uses net rental income for this, so it's about $147.16/month)maintenance - $1,000/yearcapex - $160/monthinsurance - $1,000/yearwith a 25% down payment and 4.5% thirty year financing for the balance, I net a whopping -.82%.  

You need you buy and renovate, maybe turn a SFR in to a duplex, something, which will improve the living density.