More advanced ways of finding distressed off market properties are think of various conditions under which an owner of a distressed property with equity may be highly motivated to sell, and then figure out what sort of paper trail that may leave ... follow the paper trail to find the owner.

as Jay suggested a trip to the planning department would be worth your time.. however a visit with a good land planning company in PDX would be worth it as well.Key will be where your house is situated on the lot.. unless your thinking of demolishing the house.I have 9 projects going now in PDX all with some sort of lot split they take from 1 to 2 years to get done and 5 to 20k each ...

They want your business and I'm sure will help you sort it out.  

Understand some out of area sellers create a false dilemma as part of their sales pitch so sort of REI deniers for SoCal cash flow as this would be obvious competition if their potential clients knew better.

And if so what sort of renovations did you do?

It's right across the street from a beach, and he said it's sort of like a duplex type deal.

But three simultaneous vacancies sort of pushed me to get them all done as soon as possible. 

If no one ever opens an estate but someone later wants a marketable title, that person will contact the Department to sort out the issues.

I'm in a duplex of sorts, at least it has a mother-in-law suite to help with expenses.Under Education up top are a lot of good 'how-to' guides.  

There are all sorts of articles, blog posts, podcasts, etc. on this website that you can dig into from there.