@Troy Owen  absolutely agree with all of your points, thats why i had 3 contractors come out whom i personally met with, followed by a licensed structural engineer. essentially it sounds like the problem was a combination of drainage issues (yes downspouts, gutters, clogged drains etc) as well as an extra rainy/wet winter.

HUD requires wet signatures, physical contracts/addenda, and has very short time frames.

If laminate gets wet it blows up like a balloon.

You might want to look at getting your feet wet with a personal property. 

I am getting my feet wet first in real estate wholesale, so that I can get to a point where I can start flipping homes.

The first few days of looking my wife and I kind of went from realtor to realtor, and I know that might be frowned upon by some but we just needed to get our feet a little wet and also we were pretty upfront with the realtors about where our minds were at, but now we're working exclusively with one realtor and she's found a lot of great houses that we're going to go check out tomorrow.

Since a lot of it is wet towels it can't really sit for long either.PM me if you're interested in benchmarking or collaborating.  

When we bought it, it had structure issues, mold,  no HVAC, leaky roof(cough, cough-- 4 layers of shingles), stolen copper pipes, closed off floor plan pretty much all the bad cards were thrown our way...  

Would any agents like to provide some contact information to a young man who wants to get his feet wet in the REI industry? 

I'm making a relatively large investment (1m+) in the restaurant Industry so most of my time will be focused on running my restaurants.I'd like to keep my investment low until I get my feet wet.