Buying a house and being in collections means you are putting your new house at risk, so I wouldn't do it. 

Landlord: Focus on applicant criteria, vetting potential tenants, thorough lease agreements, outline tenant expectations, perform regular walk throughs with tenants, and use web-based rent collection and maintenance requests. 

In essence this sounds like you are saying that the mortgage still exists as a lien again the title, however, the recourse the lender has is now limited to just seizure of the property, and not trying to chase collections from the FIL.

@ Dave Fosteractually, I only put the kids on recently and we haven't been collecting rent for a while because the house was thrashed and the friends that moved in were "supposed" to be fixing it up. 

In 20 years, should she still be there and require any extra additions, collect a deposit from her to cover the costs of removing them once she leaves and ensure they are professionally installed-at her expense.

A team is merely a collection of individuals in various different businesses that you can rely on help you move your own business forward.

Just thought I'd ask the collective genius that is present here if you had any suggestions.    

We started incurring costs for our first rental late in one tax year, and didn’t collect rent until March of the next tax year.  

We are going to go over to them on Monday to collect the rent.

You should also have a condition permitting you to collect estoppels from the tenants and use the information collected to verify the leases and financial information reported by the Vendor.4) When it comes to Earnest Money (more commonly called simply a Deposit here), you should consider a minimum of 5% - 10%.