I want to purchase the properties, set up everyone on a month to month lease, transfer the utilities to tenants and eventually raise the rents and collect deposits. 1.

The due will be time/effort collecting.  

These areas have much more active management of properties with more collection issues, more turnover costs, more vacancy, etc. 

Who’s collecting rent and dealing with the tenant?

Consider all of the services a full service short term rental property manager offers: marketing the property on over 50 websites, taking professional listing photos, optimizing rates to maximize revenue, manage all guest interactions from inquiry through checkout, manage all maintenance issues, collect and remit city and state hotel taxes and manage reviews.

Collect an IRS Form W-9: Before paying a contractor, collect a completed W-9 form from them.

We also like to sit down with the current manager and go through everything related to how they are running the park (collecting rent, problem tenants, sales of homes, marketing efforts, recurring maintenance items, problem areas in the park infrastructure, etc)Compliance - this includes everything related to city, county, and state compliance to continue to run the property as a park.

I am retired and collecting a pension and access to 401k funds (1099-R income)...so I am wondering how all of the information I am hearing about tax benefits as it pertains to W2 incoming applies to my 1099-R income. 

Without these tools, you'd have to do a lot of manual data collection and copy/pasting of comps/data into a spreadsheet for every property you analyze, was kinda the reason for building this out.

I'm pretty sure in some states that would not only violate local/state ordinances on maximum collection of a deposit, but could also be considered a form of discrimination.