Average rents around the area are 1100/mo.

If you decide to invest in these areas I would suggest that you do the same renovation that would be done in a good area, but with a lesser expensive products ( instead of hardwood we use strip vinyl with wood pattern).

Because you are selling a service based product.

What was the average time you went without rents between non paying evictees and vacancy? 

People like to think of themselves as being productive by looking for funding.

Different loan products have different criteria, some are more stringent than others - there are some loans you can't get if there is no furnace in place, if the kitchen is incomplete- that kind of thing.

"B" areas are nice, safe and perfectly livable -- sort of middle of America, and the average person probably wouldn't mind living there.

Consider the source: I'm in the Bay Area and without even thinking about it I did indeed implicitly make that assumption because that's basically all we've seen if you take any 10 year average from the last 5 decades. 

I bet you will be buying a house in no time once you start working with a lender that is able to offer a variety of loan products and outline the steps you need to take.

From there you have buy and hold investors for rentals and they tend to pay the most for SFR investors.Look at the data for MLS and see that over the last 6 months for instance 200 properties sold to investors at an average of 140,000 sales price.