Does it make sense to cheap out over the few thousand dollars it will cost to go through a proper escrow and title process?

Your current title company did what you hired them to do.

They always say in the letter they send about the transfer not to worry, all the payment info will transfer automatically but then they have issues processing payments on their end and it’s always difficult getting through to anyone who knows how to resolve the issue on their end. 

Perhaps a nice 1950's built bungalow.Always hire a 3rd party property inspector to give you an unbiased feel for the home.

The only challenge is that I’d probably need to hire someone to manage it while I’m not there if I do an STR, right ?  

Once you have enough equity you can go through the process of removal without refinancing.  

For payment processing, we use Stripe. 

We’ve tried off-site laundry, but our sheets get mixed up and replaced with lower-quality ones, so we prefer on-site washing.Currently, our cleaners have about four hours between guests to process 6–8 loads, but the dryer is the bottleneck at 1.5 hours per load.

At first, I want to purchase 1 mobile home to fix and flip to learn the process.

Thank you again for pointing me in the right direction—I’m looking forward to learning from this process!