When you buy a house, how does that impact your credit score?

I suspect there's lots of inventory, particularly for new folks coming into the area that find the real estate prices are much better than where they came from.Do you have a type of house you like to target?

They also set up their own mortgage servicing arm to do it in-house, as opposed to farming it out to a third party. 

If you are going to do direct to seller then yes, worth it!

I'm working on a creative finance deal with a 50/50 subto/seller finance deal.

Don't split the work between multiple contractors if possible, finding one to do all or most of the work will keep prices down.Challenges were finding replacement pieces for certain items as manufactured homes were very different than stick built as well as going through state guidelines for affixing the house to the land

I think if you can nail that down you will be able to find a market easier.As a buy and hold investor some of the things that were important to me when deciding on a market were landlord tenant laws, price to rent ratio, housing demand, ability to build a team, large population 500K plus, multi-family availability and some other factors.take the process step by step and you will be fine. 

However, I see this as a vertical integration and bringing more capabilities in house to make more money instead of hiring an outsider firm. 

Quote from @Cari Sweet:  This sounds like a case for Fair Housing- Familial Status discrimination. 

We all invest in real estate in order to make money, and keep in mind that someone who can only afford to live in a mobile home and seller-finance to buy the land is probably tight on funds.