Got a call from the tenant that the utility company couldn't find the house to transfer the utilities(no mailbox and numbers pulled off the house for exterior painting :O).

Because taxes are low here and I only look at places with tenant paid utilities, I drop the ratio down to 1.5 - 1.8% personally.

My fun is in rehabbing properties - so far I've only held as rentals but would like to be able to acquire some properties that would make good flips as well.I have a background in construction and my brother is a general contractor - so I get some pretty good deals on vendors and materials (most of his vendors do work for high end home builders as well).For the last 10 years, I've also had my TX RE sales license but have not done too many deals utilizing it.

Tenants pay their own utilities.

Walls, floors, siding, counters, utils, etc.

I called the utility co. and the property I'm going to see has the power turned off right now.

I've come to my senses and am in the process of trying to establish a systematic approach to doing one.

The agent has no idea if the tenents have even been paying rent in the past year or anything about leases.We are worried about establishing any info on tenants if we buy the building.

The buyer does then "own" all rights to the position in the contracts, even though their name(s) aren't listed on there as the buyer (they have the assignment docs & all the disclosures that prove their ownership).But what I recommend doing is having the attorney print out an additional set of docs (with identical terms) so the new buyer can sign that set with the seller directly (sometimes some utilities require the tenant buyer to show a lease between them & the seller directly).

One thing that comes to mind--what if there's an energy crunch in the future that drives up utilities costs and larger houses become less desirable?