He prefers to stay south of the river, but may make exceptions.

The exception to this would be if you are forming a disregarded single member LLC.  

Over the two years of the rent-to-own contract, the tenant/buyer made all his payments except for the last one.

Rest of the house looked quite decent (except no kitchen). 

So do you find most of your success in this area through working with your network of people and finding those few exceptional deals?

Those who have a few million lying around and go in all-cash are probably the exception. ;-)

The lender requires 75k and does not do exceptions to it because it is securitized.  

Usually a state has an exception if you're looking to invest in residential property, it may not be considered doing business in that state and you won't have to foreign qualify if that's the case.

Everything looks OK with this, except for that iffy crime rate.  

Never use anything except M2M leases as you will need to be able to quickly remove non performing tenants.