Tenants cannot have an excuse that I am not paying rent for last month or not paying for repair and deduct it from security deposit(who knows what all other damages they have?).

And not a coincidence that the people that do damage the property are usually the offenders.

Most of the time it's safe to rent to a military person or family but there are many military people who have never rented a home before or will cause some damage due to negligence or inexperience.Obviously military people can move between units, even on the same post, but it helps to at least have a starting point.

Easy enough fix, but the damage could have been much worse....Pay a roofer to certify it.

If I wanted to get into investing and I had to do so without relying on a credit score (and not damaging it either), this is what I'd probably do.

Maybe new windows and depending on the amount of damage tenants do all sorts of other costs that would possibly not be required if the home was owner occupied.

Unfortunately, that is a large enough percentage of the country that she has a shot of gaining an office where she can do some major damage...

To the landlords here, I'm sure I'm not the only landlord here to have experienced a nonpaying tenant make a lot of claims about b.s. repairs needed, often from damage they created, in order to break the lease and try to get their security deposit back.

Could this possibly be termite damage?

If the area is good the other items can be fixed.If the area is bad it doesn't matter what you do.You could make it the nicest building in a bad area and the tenant calls you get from the pictures once they see the area and other buildings they won't rent from you.Then you are left with the type of tenants living there now.Also is to check on how big of a loan balance is on this property.This landlord might have tons of deferred costs because the debt service is taking all of the cash flow.They can't evict the current tenants because they have no money to rehab the units.You also need to know the eviction process for the area.Even if you get a writ the marshals office could have hundreds to serve that month and a 4 day process takes 6 weeks for them to come out.Even if you account for lost rent when buying to evict these tenants you will not know what kind of damage they will do before you get them out.John do not believe the seller or the brokers agent.This might be a deal but only at the right price.The seller cannot command a premium and dump of problems at the same time (unless the buyer is a sucker or a first time purchaser which sadly sellers hope for).