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%If you think residential BPOs are useless, you should familiarize yourself with BPOs on commercial property…..First, I’ve NEVER seen a BPO on commercial property that utilizes the income capitalization or cost approach.  

if so, about how much does that cost to initiate (ballpark)? 

You'll get all kinds of responses to help you understand the average cost and you can then follow up by interviewing cleaners and asking for references.

Some of those variables are the size of the park, number of vacant spaces, the number and type of park amenities, the age of the park, underground infrastructure age and condition, park location, size of the market, city water or well, city sewer or septic, other utility sources and whether or not they are direct billed, deferred maintenance, cost of management, and more.

This allows most of the investors that I work with the ability to get interests rates on new construction investment properties as low as 4.25%.  

Otherwise they will continue to pay yearly taxes and maintenance costs, and not be able to foreclose the property as it will sit here leaking and falling apart and the mold continuing to spread.

I’m curious to know if the 10-15% fee (being low for STR) is worth it.

Putting more thought into this @Kevin Sobilo ...KEEP Town home: we would have to use an FHA/low/no money loan for our next primary = high mortgage. 

I was able to get them $9,000 off of the asking price, and a $30,000 concession to cover closing costs and a rate buydown further increasing their cash flow.

Once you find a house that you believe would be a good rental, meaning desirable to your target market of customers (people within a couple of mile radius of the place), and all of the costs of monthly ownership that you can accurately project fall below the rental amounts that you project that you can get from your target customers, then you have a possible business asset that you can use to produce income, and have renters pay down the mortgage, while hopefully it goes up in value at least with the rest of the economy.