How's someone in Australia ever going to do that successfully? Sounds like I'll need to live there to do this.
You nearly need to or have someone on the ground who you trust 100% to do this.
Its nowhere near flying to Sydney/Brisbane/Melbourne for the weekend, as the varying list price, foreclose price, short sale price, pre-forclosure price, auction price, then land taxes, banks approving, S Corps.
Then on top of this finding tradies who are good AND reliable to get work done, and tenants to pay you on time. This is due to many of the places do get either trashed, fumigated etc.
While official stats are around 9.6% of the US are unemployed, in my area in S/Florida I'd put it closer to 15%
Interestingly, if you go there you'll find people still have money to go out and hit the pub.
When I was there we did two offers on properties, they both ended up falling over. I'm near at the conclusion that i'd rather buy some blocks of land for about $15-20k and just sit on it for a few years... no maintenance, no tenants issues, no insurances, just rates.
One thing to note about the E coast as well is the hurricanes make insurance extortionate.