I was wondering what people think about buying houses in an area where most likely the occupants are section 8 and the area has high crime.

You call the police when the occupant is doing something illegal, or is a physical threat to you or herself.This is pretty basic law enforcement vs. civil matter stuff.

Loans under $50K are a special product, even for owner occupants.  

BiggerPockets is Now Able to Target Advertising Based on the Following Criteria:- Occupation: We can target ads to show for a user based upon their chosen occupation on our site.

All the good ones get snapped up during the owner occupant bid period.

A year down the road, with 75% LTV financing in place, the ROI on your investment is near 100%, year in and year out – before consideration of tax benefits and likely NOI growth.As Bryan notes, you can also elect to sell when you've got occupancy up to >85% for 9-12 mths, as a 12-15% cap, scoring a huge gain.

We want to know how to research this area of investment, how to project occupancy, differences in using regular rental contracts, deposits, etc.

It needs far too much cosmetic work for the typical owner-occupant, which explains why it has sat on the market for so long in an extremely popular area.There have been two houses in the same neighborhood that were bought, rehabbed, and sold within six months of the initial sale, for what appears to be very decent profit margins.

However, "tenant" (prior owner, or new occupant), has personal property damage.

When I was tweaking my BP profile, I noticed that there were occupation labels for Architect, Contractor, and other real-estate-related design/construction professionals, but there was not one for Engineer.I submitted a request via the Contact Us link to add an Engineer label.