The HOA has an exterior insurance policy for the condos (Image 1). 

As an example if your house was going to sell in two weeks for full price, and some random person came up to you and said I really want this house but I need six weeks to get you the money.

There are several things to do legally after that.Every county and state is different as far as what they do with tax defaults, so you can't go by what a random person says. 

Upper right hand cornerCan't control the image size. that's Bigger Pockets, decision

Buying a cheap, random property in the midwest just is not going to do anything for you.

I encourage people to invest either where they live, or within an hour or so, because there are so, so many threads on BP from folks who bought a random OOS property just to "get a deal" and immediately regretted it.

The valuations on them appear to be completely arbitrary and in many instances the company seem randomly selectedWe had one recently from someone else who provided the opinion and the comps were 7 miles away and from another jurisdiction - whereas this property while in a more rural area had considerable sales that could have been used.If you use them to get an idea for property condition I find them to have some value but since they have no interior inspection reports, they are at best just a random guess of the value which could be off by 100%

Take this 💥just-closed renovated property for example💥:With my query of "22757 Charlemont Pl, Woodland Hills, CA 91364 5/4/2400-3050,0.6,300" we get an ARV Estimate that is ~4% off, and I picked this at random just scrolling through recently closed in my areaAnd the Market Stats $/sf of renovated property in that Zip Code matches up pretty well, so I know the ARV estimate is realistic:You can also run Agent Stats to find/get in touch with the real top-agents in that area so you can triple-verify everything and/or list it with them when you are done.With the above, I am able to quickly vet every new deal that comes my way and spend more time on the good ones.

I take it that it's safer to just assume that any letter from or call from a random number is most likely some kind of rip off?   

However, randomly contacting numerous professionals from a list is inefficient and wastes both your time and theirs.