I've heard that location doesn't matter for accountants, but I'm old fashioned and like face to face relationshipsjason

You loan them money, secured by the property, and get a monthly interest payment and, hopefully, your principal returned in some fashion.  

What is accurate will be a highly regional question, I'd suggest chatting with a lender local to where you are buying.The reason expressing it as a % is never accurate is because the closing costs do not scale up and down in a linear fashion with purchase price.

If during one of their flips the market turns on them, they will fix and sell for 80-90 cents on the dollar (again, in under 90 days) like they did the last downturn and still make money.As a buy and hold operator working in this fashion, you get the tax benefits that these guys don't get but you have to deal with tenants and you still have multiple exit strategies to mitigate market and other risks  ... you could wholesale it for profit, you could fix and flip it for profit, you could hold it as a rental for profit (and being in at 70 cents on the dollar will certainly help your cash flow), and sell or cash out refinance at any point in time in the future, and you can change your mind at any point in time if you want or need to.

I've got an old SF teammate who just bought a house in Cameron last year and in typical Army fashion is PCS'ing back to Ft Campbell this summer. 

call title or escrow company they should have a direct feed on this .. or if you one of those old fashion states that is still stuck in the last century     and if the county website is down you may have to go to the tax collectors office and pull it up there.

To make it even cleaner, have them deed the collateral (car, other house, jewelry, etc) into your friend’s name (as long as you trust them) and let your friend give you the payments.

Since the majority of members seem to be investors in one form or fashion, thought it would be a good creative way to visually see success through out the deal.

There's so much info available on website, blogs and in good old fashioned books.

I get that leverage can be a beautiful thing in REI, and call me old-fashioned, but I'm just not a fan of debt.