You likely won't find your answer on the internet, FB marketplace is a good start, but I found all my help up there through referrals and picking up the phone. 

Savoy investors use them for additional fire power when buying deals.

I currently have a full-time career as a senior engineer in the aerospace industry, but I’ve always been interested in real estate, and I view REI as a way to supplement my future retirement.I’m interested in initially doing fix and flips to build up capital for buy and hold investments in multi-family properties, and I have about $200K in home equity that I can leverage to get started.

It's better than what you'll get from most attorneys and what you'll find on the internet.

However, in residential I buy everything direct to seller. 

If your home is in a solid area and you can hold onto it while having even some cash flow, I would usually pick that option.From the experience I have seen with my dad and holding properties long term and conversations I've have with older investors is that if you hold onto RE, you will usually be happy you did so.Most investors say: I never really regretted buying, but I have regretted selling. 

We are interested in buying our first rental OR flip.

Tom Henderson puts out a good book ...you can get either hard copy or pdf......The challenge with most of this seems to be FINDING notes to buy from private sellers. 

We have a company that buys Non-Performing Loans and, as a secured creditor, we love seeing BK paperwork.

I know this is not your "typical" reason to refinance, however, I am wondering what you all think about using that equity on a home purchase as buying a home right now is extremely important to us not only for just having a home, but also prices will not come down for quite some time with our housing shortage.