I think the only thing you are missing is, if nobody is bothered by the transactions then nobody presses charges?

According to this post, for a $180k property, you'd be paying almost $19k in total FHA insurance costs as opposed to $5.1k for conventional PMI.My conclusion is that, unless you are extremely pressed to buy a house before building a good enough credit score and downpayment, you should absolutely wait to get a conventional loan instead of going for an FHA loan.

But I'm just going to keep hunting and pressing forward.

Some of my best deals were word of mouth and accidental.  

We've had an agent cost us $10K because he spent too much time reading his own press and did not know when to get out of his, and our, way.  

Here are the basic stats on single-single family homes sales for Dec. 2016 for the City of Austin and the Greater Austin Area.Here are excerpts of from a recent press release from the Austin Board of REALTORS®:“The Central Texas housing market is slowly beginning to align with long-term historical trends.

Sorry you had to become an accidental landlord in this city. 

Chicago is a huge market, and so small areas of the city can get a lot of press.

no new jobs plus new/extended benefits (thanks to the government printing press) equals more tough times of a different nature.I'm sure glad to hear others have a more sanguine opinion of what's ahead.

I have some investments that I would be hard pressed to value because I rarely see them.