Michael C.

If tenants can not afford to pay for their own heat and $1200 is all you can get in your market with heat included my guess is your tenant base is C class which is unreliable at best. $3000 is not much money to add a bathroom but I doubt the expense will have the positive impact you desire. 

If the area is a good area for cash flow it will probably be a c neighborhood or lower.  

One thing though, you need to do an analysis on your returns of your real estate (hint: you should use software to do this) versus the expected returns on the TSP fund you invest in (for me I'm in C fund and will go to G-fund around S&P 2350 since the market looks toppy).A con is that you can only take out 50% or 50k, whatever is the lesser amount.

William C.

"C" rated area.0.25 acres for $3,000.

What do you think is the best area in VA to begin investing in B, B- , & C class neighborhoods?

His mother is going into an assisted living facility and needs to sell...all they are looking for is to pay off the mortgage owed (about $108K) I would prefer not to come out of pocket to satisfy in full b/c i have other projects going on and i'm a bit cash strapped until they close.

Not ideal, but a potential fix could be forming an LLC treated as a blocker "C" corporation, obtain the EIN, contribute the real property into the C corp, then sell using the C corp.  

@Jimmy Calabrese So far I have only emailed first b/c I don't want to waste my time on the phone if they're not interested.