Much of it was crap, some was worth every penny.

Force the appraisal by way of Lender Commitment time frames and on properties you are worried about ride the crap out of it to get it done and in so you loose the least amount of time possible.Some ways to get ideas of how to have better contracts, take a look at the contracts from the foreclosed REO in your area.

What I meant with REO brokers is they are not going to sit and secure a crap property over and over with the low commission they are making in a high crime rate area.They get paid a set commission regardless of the price.So whether it stays secure is not a real concern to them.If they sell a 10k house but make 10% which is 1k the condition doesn't matter to most of them.If a 200k house gets trashed where you make 6k on 3% commission or 3k on where the house gets trashed and sells for 125k the broker would stand to lose a bunch of money in that case on the sale.You could argue the broker stands to lose money by losing other listings from the bank in more sales but I don't know many brokers that do more than drop a sign with these types of properties.

Why can't a court look at this situation and order my cousin to cut the crap ?

Holy crap I didn't know that was possible.

To complement the eradication of income tax, I would implement a very high sales tax.

OK - here we go...

Was an assisted living facility (my great aunt died there last year :(

The corporation had it listed for $249k - trying to sell it as an assisted living facility shell.

Reduced the listing price ...

Its really a crap shoot.

I'm not talking about unexpected problems--crap happens to everyone from time to time.

Maybe a slummy landlord contributed initially by letting a whole block go to crap, and that slowly oozed over to another block and eventually the whole neighborhood.