When you counter, or make a substitute offer after the seller says no to your original offer, all you're doing is telling the seller your first offer won't your real offer, so the seller will keep countering until the squeeze you to death.Make one offer, no counters, no alternates, and they either accept it or they don't. 

@Raymond Cardenas- correct ...using a 401K loan for down payment purposes is normally  acceptable  and  wont  affect your qualification ratios 

Depending on the property and the deal, an experienced investor may want more than a 30% spread (and in some deals, they may be willing to take less than a 30% spread--for instance, if the property will produce incredible cashflow after rehab, they may accept a lower spread). 

We brought this up to the agents attention and quickly dismiss it saying the sellers won’t accept to create a hole on the attic, that the house is buy as it is (this was never in the terms to begin with) We offered to pay for the handy man to close the hole afterwards too & nothing. mind you, it’s not a cheap home, it’s not for closure home, seems to be in decent conditions.

The accepted wisdom is that you don't invest in condos, but ours have performed well for us, and it gave us momentum that lead to us buying SFHs elsewhere. 

They set up the process as a preliminary ‘interview’ and then if you get the first screener’s ‘recommendation,’ you move on to a 2+-hour ‘interview’ with the ‘director’ to ‘dive deeper and see if you’re a good fit’ because ‘Phil is very selective’—so selective, in fact, that ‘less than 1% of applicants are accepted to join.’

I worried that we visited, we liked and then our offer wouldn't be accepted.

Don't accept incomplete applications.

Or does it present risk, that if appraisal comes in higher, the bank can ask for more, as well as take additional offers.My understanding is, they can accept my offer, or if the appraisal comes in higher than my offer, re-open negotiations. 

Accountants are in such demand, that the best are not even accepting clients half the time.The other problem I see often with accountants on here is that they specialize in larger investors, and have really high prices when you as a smaller investor do not need all the bells and whistles.Another thing I see is folks thinking they need to have a tax professional in their state.