What you’d bring to the table is handling the rent/any issues that come up since this is what you seem to be interested in.

I think the most entertaining negotiation I've had was an investor looking for a regular sale of one of their rental properties and I ended up doing a round table negotiation with them to identify terms of the sale (my partner and I did this nice presentation with charts and graphs and stuff and they liked it a lot).

However, prices are high and I don't find realtors bringing many true "deals" to the table right now in that price range. 

That is certainly on the table.

I am thinking about raising it to $2,450 for an additional 2 year lease, so about a 7% increase, but feel I may be leaving money on the table.

Also tell them what you bring to the table as far as credit, cash and investors to get a deal done.

Run some amortization tables for your self with a fixed rate for differing length of times.You will be shocked that the changes in the mortgage payments and the effects on your ROI.Ask your partner what's the advantage to creating excessive equity when that money could have been put to work elsewhere?

Depends on what you think you bring to the table.

It's tabled now with the Budget problems. 

We are each bringing $75K to the table and each of us has 10+ yrs in RE experience.