Just like any rental, its your (or your PMs) job to sort them out.

@Pavs Doychev, Thank you for your post, very motivating to get rid of excuses and to take massive action!

It sounds like our best bet here if the insurance company doesn't cover it is to get on a payment plan of sorts with a contractor. 

This probably violates some sort of MLS bylaw.  

You could sit in jail after the little old lady across the street calls the cops, trespassing and breaking and entering while they sort things out.

Be careful the owner is not pocketing the money without giving you some sort of documentation on how much was your initial payment, and monthly payments being added.

When I worked with the public, the first question I asked was "tell me about your situation" because if there wasn't a motivating factor in that answer I was off the phone in under a minute. 

One of the biggest questions I have is once I find a property that has the signs of a motivated seller, how do I find out who the owner is?

I haven't checked into how to do it legally in a lease, but I'm going to try and start finding more ways to motivate my tenants to decrease utility use with some type of financial dividend that gets returned to them quarterly if use is low.

We have done months of research and have come up with a unique strategy to bring in motivated sellers and covert them to deals.