There could be white ant or drainage or any number of other nasty surprises too, making remote assessment quite inadequate.They're basically asking as-is market value, so that doesn't augur too well as to their motivation.For such a small, boring, old property, I'd probably be Offering LESS than land value.

I'll be surprised.

I did ask them point blank if they wanted to stay in the home and they look genuinely surprised, saying they loved the house, and they were sorry to cause issues.

You would be surprised what kind of returns you can get around the country.

We're getting closer to pulling the trigger on our first deal... we just want to be sure we get all our ducks in a row so there are limited surprises.

@Franco Li I do a lot of work with local credit unions and even my clients were surprised with the deal. 

I'm surprised you say your MBA hasn't helped at all though.

We did find some good investment products that I was pleasantly surprised by, but in the end the LOC just made the most sense.

You might be surprised.

All the ideas above are excellent, especially the calls for a "mini start up"...but I'm surprised to hear such a push for stocks.While investing in stocks in certainly a very common way to get people involved in investment, I'd argue that stocks are very easy to "tune out" rather than actively learn from.