Keep in mind that if you wanted to sell you only need to pay CGT on the difference between what the house was valued upon death and the sale price!

There are some great meetups in your area; the BWI meetup comes to mind (it's one of the largest in the country) as well as Greg Bennett's meetup at the Greenbelt Marriott and Andre Johnson's Deals Meetup at National Harbor. 

Then we setup other investment and savings vehicles like Roth IRAs and an HSA.  30% of our take home pay was being set aside.Then we read the @Scott Trench book Set For Life and a similar article he wrote (The Simple "Secret") about capital preservation, and it blew our minds. 

So with that mentality in mind, this person may be willing to steal tools or materials from Lowe's, but would never dream of stealing from you.

If the flip property is purchased with this cash, you would have to work out between the two of you who is going on title to the new house.You also have the option of borrowing just the down payment against his house, and then financing the remainder of the purchase price against the new house, although that would be less straightforward than just taking out one loan.Keep in mind a lot of lenders cap the amount of cash out you can get at $500,000 or $750,000, but there are lenders that will go to $1 million and even more than $1 million.

Ruel, you may be able to find a contractor that will walk the property and give you an estimate, but it may be tough, sounds like the Realtor gave you some idea of the rehab cost and depending on how much you trust him, sounds like he may have told you a number that may get you the house. so 205K plus say 65K for rehab puts you at 270K. you have about 10K in purchase closing costs about 22K in closing at sell, if your intention is to flip the property ( if sold for 320K) so now you are in for 302K plus holding costs, maybe another 10K, so 312K. you could make 8K in profit, if you sell at 320K. i am guessing this is a foreclosure being that you said that not having a home inspection would make a difference with the bank in selling it, because most lending banks would want a home inspection. you can have an inspection for your own piece of mind but still waive the inspection.

I don't mind offering $1000-$1500 if they move out peacefully.(2) Do I run at risk of pissing them off and resulting in them trashing the property before it gets ratified?

As a Broker, I use it as a marketing tool and don't mind when clients find properties via this avenue. 

Keeping that general path in mind, I'm not one to be blind to other opportunities. 

I have heard some people use a VA to rip through a county website to get the a full list of delinquent taxes.Right now, I do not mind doing any grunt work to build a list for a county, but I am at a loss of how to manually create this list.