I'm hoping that you could take out a mortgage on the property for $50k for the engineering and if you had to sit on the property, you could at least farm it (or rent it out to a farmer) to make enough to cover the loan payments on $50k while you wait for an upswing. 

You will however likely be sorry you let them in.Don't forget to screen her, when your present tenants move out you could be stuck with the esister and her 2 kids.

Let's say you can buy it for $75,000, then you figure what it will take to fix it up, amount to cover the time & costs of owning it (holding costs) and the costs to sell (real estate agent, closing costs).

Also, when calculating my expenses using the 50% rule, that gave me $1775 to cover my debt service ($1229.08).

Is there any recommendations on  what company to use for tenant screening? 

However, with alot of the HOAs covering utilities with insursnce included and the fact that at these prices we would likely pay all cash going in, at monthly costs of about $750, we should be able to justify rents over $1000 and even higher numbers with short term rentals.

They came to me together wanting to rent the house, passed all screening, and signed a year lease.

At least it would cover the mortgage and some extra cash.As a side note, I couldn't make it work with an FHA because they required termite remediation (houses in LA are old) and the seller didn't want to wait (she wanted to cancel our deal).

They usually will offer tenant screening and online applications as well.

I used an FHA loan with 3.5% down and have renters covering the full mortgage.