Mortgage lenders will qualify you for a higher purchase amount for multis than they would on a single, because they will count the rent you will be making on the other units as additional qualifying income for your loan application.

Kiavi (formerly Lending Home) was one of the first lenders for Fix-n-Flip,but they are very automated.

Otherwise, you'll have to go for a hard money lender and expect 12%+.

The borrower gets the benefit of having access to capital fast and the lender gets the benefit of charging a higher interest rate and not having to pay taxes on the profit.

I suspect that DSCR lenders are more likely to exercise the DOS option when transferred.

After 45 + years as a real estate investor, broker, lender, fund manager and syndicator, I’ve become aware that the “dream” of many investors and investor “hopefuls” is to be able to generate enough cash flow to live off their real estate holdings and accumulate enough wealth to make “work” optional.

I understand the safest option is to have a lawyer review the lease, but I figured I'd try to answer my beginner questions here and not waste the lawyers time (and my money) on the "for dummies" explanation.Thank you!

Perhaps we "buy" the house from them for the $328K balance to satisfy the lender and don't need a large down payment and then have a separate contract with them to pay $x per month until we've paid the full $172K amount.

It's a fairly unregulated space (charging grandma $750 to puts around for 3 hours, after moving the old box from the horizontal sensor, which was the only problem with the garage door to begin with), so some combination of carefully reading reviews (you have to actually read them to make sure it's not 200 fake reviews), and maybe not giving them the full contract all at once, is in order. 

There are also a lot of different options in real estate to single family residential, multifamily, commercial, NNN and then being on the debt side of being the lender which has cash flow but not appreciation.