Or does title just transfer and then the buyer is responsible for the payments?

Where are you getting your data from/what Mibor reports are you running.

So many use a strategy of buying in an LLC they transferring the LLC to the new buyer.

That is very hard with off market deals, because the information about the property is often times hard to get - there is no data sheet about the property - and you are operating in a legally less regulated space.

However, if you become self-employed you can transfer the former employer 401k plan to a solo 401k plan and then you can borrow from the solo 401k plan. 

Is there a way to know if a special warranty deed was transferred via financing or cash? 

Often those protections of the LLC do not transfer if you buy personally then put the property into the LLC after.  

But when the loan is paid off how does she transfer the title to me for zero cost?  

I believe they have a subscription system however from what I recall it's a little bit expensive and is not very user friendly.You can pull the public data from the various websites and then go and extrapolate everything, but unless you've got a pretty good programmer who can build out some engines to go scrape everything you will end up doing a lot of that mining manually.

Because this deposit typically transfers over to the new tenant's security deposit, should I be charging an amount equal to the security deposit or only a fraction of that amount?