Your choice here is Government backed coverage with warranty, Contractor's bond (ie CA has them), Commercial General Liability (less likely), and lastly Plumbing company in-house warranty, in that particular order.

Builders are looking forward to the promise of removing rules and regulations that stifle the Economy.

I have heard that because they are insured by the government they are a little easier to be approved for?

For Buy and Hold investors, there's a myriad of questions that are clearly outlined in the Federal Fair Housing regulations -- IMO, this is a first read primer for the B&H REI.

Qualified Intermediaries are a relatively recent phenomena (mid 80s ish when the tremors of the starker case finally worked through the system) brought about by the regulations changes after Starker v commissioner.  

We believe that this housing and mortgage crisis has to be fixed by the people of this country; we cannot count on government and wall street to fix it; we can only count on them to allow greed to screw things up again...and that is exactly what is happening right now.  

If your grandpa doesn't have a will in effect, the sale will be governed by your state laws.Anyway, best to you.

So you have to get in early.HUD homes are foreclosed properties that had government insured home loans like FHA and others...They want the homes to go to owner-occupants if possible.

As a LL, you will run into this from time to time and it's a real pain, but if you fail to follow the regulations, the tenant can come back and sue you for the value + putative.

So for example, if this was purchase from and auction (government tax or private sector auction) make sure that their are no judgments or government liens on the property...these types of issues don't come out of the shadow until the government does a national audit on all their outstanding debts.