Since you are doing new construction I would suggest making them private enough where guest have minimal interaction with each other.

HML is expensive, better to use private money from friends or family. 

I'll send you a private message to discuss the area further and how, if possible, I can bring any value to you or work together on something.

Given your previous career, your goals, and wanting to diversify your investments, I'm wondering if you might find value in the PassivePockets community, it's a community with private forum dedicated to passive investing in syndications.

Getting a loan to payoff another loan with a lower interest rate doesn't make any sense. we do private lending and can get double digits returns consistently.

And as far as legal—an attorney becomes essential once you're ready to finalize terms with either an HML or private lender to make sure everything’s secure.Hope this helps!

This is in a town that has a very good Private College - Baylor University.

Some private lenders will step in and fund.

If discussing with someone in a forum and you all take it to private messages, that's a different story.

Meet with a local banker & schedule a time to talk with a mortgage broker, they'll give you at least a baseline of what kind of down payment options and rates are out there.After that, if you're still wanting to research more creative options, do some looking into seller financing (a very hot topic with good, and bad, advice out there), look into private lenders, and commercial financing options.If you're wanting to live in 1/4 of your quadplex, then conventional residential loans may in fact be your best option as you can purchase that with a fannie/freddy loan with very low down, and use up to 75% of the income from the property toward your own income.