@James Smith I wish the previous owners had taken your mindset, the mess of heating pipes and electrical conduits in this building just ran up through the floors out in the hallways. 

However, remember, they are the conduit for the sale.  

If you go underground wiring it is very expensive since you are looking at conduit plus wiring cost but it looks cleaner in my opinion. have any of you MHP investors purchased a park and then added some pads to the land? 

If you run the conduit under the baseboard or run the wiring in wire molding, this can look really, really nice.

I can simply frame around the metal conduit with 2x2 and frame out the basement walls. if I want to hide the wiring in the existing walls I would need to replace the wiring.

They will draw power from your main electrical panel and place conduit runs outside and inside.

You'll lay out a lot of money to get 5 separate meters (which, in addition to the meters which aren't free, will mean a lot of conduit running and probably a few more distribution panels) before you ever even get to the cost of installing 5 new electric heating setups (whether it be electric baseboard or heat pumps).   

If you need to update to modern code it may have to be all surface work( conduit etc.)

The joints and joinery look a lot like fixtures used for creating conduit from galvanized pipe...at least they do to me.There are a lot of investors I know - some very successful ones - who will only buy properties on a slab foundation.  

When furniture is in place surface mount conduit is barely visible anyways.