I know lots of business-people who don't work in the day-to-day aspects of their business (and some no longer work in the business at all), and most of them don't have any partners.Those who do have partners don't have them in order to pass off work -- they have them in order to compensate for skills they don't have themselves and they can't easily hire out to employees or contractors.

During your initial research of the property list you should look for the county civil court records to see if any of the above have been named as defendants in the suit to foreclose, that is quick and can easily be done from home (in my county at least).  

Make his/her job very easy by giving them the MLS# so that they can look it up easily. 

Here's what I would do: get it under contract ASAP with a relatively long due diligence period (60-90 days) and market it in several ways: 1) debt or equity raise paying investors 8-10% interest or splitting up the equity with you taking x% for finding/managing the deal; 2) piecemeal wholesale (sell individual or smaller bundles of the properties; or 3) wholesale it all.You can easily raise that down payment money if the deal is good enough.

Flat painted / textured ceilings get Original Kilz Oil since they can't be scrubbed easily.

We could easily convert one of the bedrooms into a common area/living space.

Again, definitely don't dive into a really expensive program right off, but you can always learn things from the smaller ones pretty easily if you keep your ears open at them.

I found that on the soft ones, the railing used to click together would break easily so I opted for the more sturdy ones.As for the stick-on types, I woould be afraid that they would peel off if the floor wasn't clean enough when installing them. 

, credit cards (shows poor money management), auto loans (if they won't pay their car bill, knowing that the car can be easily repossessed, then I'm less confident they'll pay their rent), etc.You don't say what type of accounts these applicants have in collections, but the fact that they pay their student loans "promptly", always paid their previous landlords on time, and their income "more than meets your requirements" are all very good signs.

Easily remedied by slipping in the dates after "2 years" (date - date).