Not a bad strategy to reduce your out of pocket.  

The people buying for cheap will reduce market rent rates to lease up fast bringing the market down permanently or at least for 3 to 6 months.

I realize you can lead a horse to water, but my theory is that if If just 1 in 100 tenants listen or read these books and help their financial situation, it may reduce my turnovers and cost of turnovers.I'm curious as to if anyone has tried this or something similar in their welcome package.

Now your cash flow is reduced by this amount: $1000 -$360=$640.$640 x 12 months =$7680 - Your cash flow for the year.Going back and looking at the fact that you invested only $30,000 cash, we will calculate the cap rate using only the cash involved:$7680 divided by $30,000= 25%You can see now that using cash only versus a high interest mortgage for this market is significantly increasing your cap rate. 25% vs 13.3%.Using the same scenario, you can use buy 3 homes with the same $90,000 and have a total cash flow of $7680 x 3 = $23,040 versus using all the cash in one home and getting $12,000 per year cash flow.There are other factors to consider of course...

If so, it would seem like it would be, in effect, a penalty since you do not get the tax benefits and your cost basis is reduced. 

This could really reduce the hourly rate of return from your rental business per hour of your time invested.

And real estate values would have plummeted because of the reduced population.  

What everyone needs are products, services and policy structures designed by real estate investors, for real estate investors and one of those features is a portfolio type master policy, with no location limits, with the ability to insure multiple controlling entities and properties in any stage of renovation, in all 50 states, offering agreed value, special form coverage with theft and vandalism, the ability to actually reduce premiums incrementally by aggregating locations AND do it all on a monthly reporting basis so that you and your CPA can easily see the breakdown in coverage and premium for every location. 

They force you to constantly do specials that reduce your profit margins.

Some cities in my area are being proactive and bulldozing boarded up houses and I think that's probably the best route to take.