Churches, alumni, fraternal & social work agencies, or organizations typically, along with thousands of arts, education, cultural & industry specific associations make a lot of effort to donate, or subsidize housing---in particular. if your mortgage is $ 300K at 6% apr using $ 2,500 a month in the first few years nearly $ 18K will be deductible. if you're renting to some tenants certain programs will filter far more inducements to both you and the tenant. obviously there are reasons that you'd most likely want to own units that cost $ 60K and rent for $ 1,500 a month to make even more sense out of these opportunities. when i was 23 my best friend a newly mented attorney, who lived with me pursued buying a 2 family home that the City of NY's Housing Development Preservation (HPD) offered us for $ 1. it needed about $ 150K of improvements. we were supposed to borrow the $ 150K at 1% interest under a very aggressive renovation schedule that returned the property to it's fully taxed  assessed value in 90 to 120 days; or we'd have to pay 2% apr for the sums we elected to borrow from an HPD aligned lender. my income was 3 times the lawyers; and i wanted him to live in another 26 unit apartment building we were developing under an even more lucrative program that allowed us to borrow $ 500K at 1%, if we ("I") put down $ 25K. i wound up renovating the apartment building on my credit cards and we walked away from the 2 family: due to the lawyer's reluctance to move into the apartment building. i actually felt that having him in my own apartment really confused the women that visited me.

I met him in our church.

You will have to follow some steps concerning how you bill, what needs to be on the bill, how soon prior to requiring the bill be paid you deliver the bills, late charges, disconnect fees and times you can shut off service, when and shy you shut off service, not over billing etc...

I believe that the seller will shut off utilities after closing, so in hindsight, I should have had the energy company scheduled to turn the utilities on, in my name, the late morning or afternoon of closing :/ 

Get everything hooked up to be able to take over when you shut the old one off. 

This works better with a larger air compressor that puts out more CFM, ideally more than 3 CFM is what you want.Walk around and make sure all faucets are shut off.  

go into effect as proposed, those tenants are going to be getting some MASSIVE heat bills and as I think someone did mention, we also have what sure sounded like a nice, do gooder type program here where they by law cannot shut off your gas and electric during the winter till Apr 15th for nonpayment of your bill.That sounded great and yes, it would make is all look and feel like a bunch of heartless bastards to shut off heat during the winter, problem is though that for whatever reason a fair amount of people then run their heat literally at 80, 82, 85 degrees all winter long AND have a few windows open or even my personal favorite I've seen a million times, its -8 degrees and some goof has their main front exterior door OPEN with just the flimsy glass storm door shut to block the cold.

I am not sure how to go about looking for deals on my own with a hectic work week and family/church commitments.   

Hahaha, I believe you're referring to what we like to call 'The Purple Church'.  

Surprisingly, Ancestry has a good deal of genealogical research already completed, too.Former associates, neighbors, and community affiliations like church and social clubs can help, especially in small towns.