@Charles Hawkins, most times (or at least my bias) is a single family, or even small multifamily BRRRR does not have enough meat on it to make sense for all parties and a split.  

Full disclosure I’m pretty biased though.

Are they objective in their decisions for both sides or did they seem biased in their decisions?

For me I'm always biased to the KISS rule and would just do simple 1031's property by property.

Expensive, high property taxes, cumbersome govt oversight, and a strong bias against landlords. 

Brokers are tasked at selling so their numbers are biased.

Admit though I have a bias towards what I know and am comfortable with, so if you're confident in strategy 1, best of luck. 

I'm biased, but I love the area. 

None of that is true, at all (I could go over why Realtors believe that, it involves both self-selection bias and confirmation bias acting together, but that's not strictly relevant to your question), but that listing agent believes it's true, and will advise their seller client to throw your FHA offer in the trash, if they have any other options at all in terms of which offer to accept, which is very probable in this market... because, guess what, all your competing buyers also have Realtors, and they too are advising their clients to use conventional rather than FHA.

Survivorship bias means the only people responding to your question either:A.