Hi,I am researching these for a 1031 exchange.  Anyone have good or bad experiences with these?

So we need to churn and burn and start making some cash.

Of course if you can get away without paying for entities to protect from legal liability, and you never get audited by the IRS, and your house doesn't burn down, you are better off not paying for services that protect you from that. 

Wow.I have a friend who's vacation rental burned to the ground; she said hiring an insurance adjuster of her own to work with her insurance company was helpful.If your tenants have their own renters insurance that should help.I agree you should get a structural engineer out there to determine if there is any structural damage, and I think getting a lawyer to assist, maybe two, one who is familiar with landlord/tenant law and another who deals with insurance perhaps.There's been a rash of older drivers around here driving into store fronts, not at a million miles an hour like in your case, but they all after-the-fact get those steel posts in front of the building, since you're at the end of an intersection maybe installing something like that might make sense, although I doubt it would have helped in this case given the cars became airborne.

I could surmise some of these investments exist solely because some dude in Cali has some extra mula burning a hole in his pocket.

Slapping lipstick on a pig with repairs, then dumping none qualified, non paying tenants into units to make the unit have inflated rents so it could sell for more.Sorry to say, this is likely just the start of the money burn.

That said, if your purchase/winning bid price is too low, and the property is redeemed, the 20% you made may not cover your attorney's fees, so people can get burned.  

Have not been burned yet.

Sherman and Burleigh is where the BP was burned down by the riots.

The hotel, located in Sonoma Wine Country, burned down in the CA wildfires last October.