Ideas for tricky investment situation needed.

G'Day,

I have a dilemma I was hoping to get some advise / suggestions on.
I'm very sorry about the long post.
I have a block of units, well actually, it's my fathers block and I'm trying to obtain a solution for him actually.
Anyway, this block is a corner block with 16 one bed units on it. They're in a Victorian country town and are located in a reasonable location a little over a km from the town center in a street with a primary school a few hundred meters away and a corner store across the road.
Unfortunately, the units have had younger less desirable tenants in them for the last few years and my father has not been able to attract any other tenants because of their reputation as such. In the last year or so, the highest lease rate has been 10 of the 16 units with them now being at only 6 or so.
The problem is, my Dad's over the dodgey young tenants and refuses to put any more back in as they're normally more trouble than they're worth.
Currently, all the units are on the one title, however he's in the process of getting them sub divided. When that's done, he'll be left with the 16 units on separate titles as well as two parcels of land. The actual corner section which is about an acre I guess and another block of about a third of an acre.
The units are made up of two buildings with 10 units in one and 6 in the other and they're solid brick (i think it's called bessa brick??) They look neat enough from the outside and the inside of each is fairly basic but livable. One unit has just been renovated inside with the intention of using it as a display suite of sorts, and it does look very good. In fact they could all look extremely good internally as well as externally as there's a nice sized common area at the back of them which could easily be landscaped to be more family orientated.
My guess is that once they're subdivided, they'll be worth 60 – 90k each and the two blocks roughly 120 and 50ish.
So, what to do?
I believe very little can be done with the current tenants still there. Leasing or selling the units is pretty much impossible until they're gone. I think there needs to be a fresh start, but the problem is my father can't afford to keep them vacant for long enough. He also can't afford to renovate them in order to obtain maximum potential lease or sale prices.
So I guess I'm after clever ways to obtain that return without spending too much money, or at least too much of his own money.
Or obviously any strategies that could be applied to this situation.
I'm all ears… or eyes, I guess!

Cheers.