While I would personally find this appealing as a personal residence I am not sure how they would perform as a rental.

Also, your money is now in a performing investment (free rent for you).

That gives you good new surfaces and might cost less than the strip and patch approach. 

Although for me as a Past HML and current NMLS broker ( inactive currently) why you would want to jump into NPN instead of looking for performing especially starting out..

You'll slowly build passive income, equity, and most importantly, you'll learn how to be a landlord and perform simple repairs. 

When they indicated it was fixed during the due diligence of the property, did they provide proof (e.g. an outside vendor invoice and what was performed)?  

A lot of things can look good on paper for you out of state Investors in Indianapolis, but I get calls and emails all the time from out of state investors wanting to off load their Indianapolis properties that aren't performing.  

The houses were their primary residence and they had to relocate which turned them into landlords because they did not want to list the property at the time, so they agreed to lease optioning the home with current tenant buyers that are not able to perform.

Those types of situations require MASSIVE time and effort to get performing again.I might buy a business myself later this year.

Basically, an assessment is nothing more than what a municipality decides a property is worth in order to tax it based upon that value.Additionally, although cities and towns are mandated to perform assessments regularly (in CT they're supposed to update assessments every 5 years), that assessment can still be quite old and outdated.