Before you can do any of the methods we talked about in previous posts, you are going to want to spend some time and some money in cleaning up the property. You never know what the interior structure will be like until you actually go into it (we had one property that had a dead body in it – that was a bummer).

In most cases you are going to want to do some painting and in some jurisdictions you will have to bring the property up to code before you can sell it. Interestingly enough, in some of those jurisdictions, you can rent it without bringing it up to code. If you are fortunate enough to have tow or three properties that you take to deed, you want to hire a local contractor to do the fix up work.

In my experience, a very large percentage of the single family residential properties that we took deed to were rental properties. Right after you insure it you inform the tenant that the rent check will now be made out to you, and you ask them if they are interested in buying the house if the terms are right. We sold a number of houses to the tenants on “contract sales” or where we carried the paper.

The tenants know the house, they are already living there so they have no moving expense – in fact, and they avoid moving expenses they would incur if you sell it to someone else. The other nice thing is that the tenant that buys the property seems to take care of it than when they were just a tenant. Since you still have an interest in the property, this is important to you.