At the end of the seventh year if my rehab loan is paid , I will deed the properties back to him and set him up with property management in place.

"Our God is in Heaven, He does whatever He pleases" Psalm 115:3 

there are a number of portfolio lenders out there that can help you if you have surpassed your conventional 10 properties on your credit. they will loan as many as you need. you simply need to have an entity set up they can loan to... down payment will be higher, interest rate will be higher, terms not as favorable but you maintain 100% control of the real estate w/ out bringing on a partner or heaven forbid take a w-2 position :)    lima one capital is a portfolio lender we have done a number of loans with and there are others too. if you want to PM me i can tell you my experience with the other portfolio lenders which is generally not good. :)

After doing this, we realized the water was now flowing out of the house over toward the drain (thank heavens the basement is sloped, that's about the only thing going for this house).

Just a friendly heads up...If you can go anywhere, think twice about Houston if like to jog or golf...but maybe heaven for gardeners or having a backyard pool.Even though I know nothing about the tech or medical industries, I may as well add that DFW is American's hub and while Dallas is huge in telecommunications it is also pretty big in everything else and has maybe the best medical school in the state...Southwestern.

If there were a heaven that would be it.

It's in a remodeled church, and I understand the food is heavenly and the ambiance is uplifting. 

I agree it's hard to find a decent person to do anything although heaven knows when I'm working on something outside in some of our neighborhoods I get a lot of guys asking if "I need help"; most of them are looking for beer money or they're the kind I'm guessing I'd have to carefully watch to make certain our tools don't grow legs and walk away with them.After a while you learn a lot doing this sort of stuff. 

I found that are still a couple of "save heavens" left in Chicago area for the kind of activity we're looking for and Northwest burbs are definitely one of them.Best of luck Paul!

Chasing heavily-encumbered property is rarely profitable and I can assure you that Ditech/Greentree/GMAC is not going to move heaven and earth to help you.Working from the other angle (the equity side) you could find an heir willing to probate the estate in order to sell you the property, presumably for some benefit to them after paying legal costs.