I believe you mentioned on a podcast to try the wholesale calculator, just leaving the fee at zero to evaluate deals...

Use it to evaluate prices and feedback and decide for yourself if the course is appropriate for the niche you want to be getting involved with:https://www.biggerpockets.com/forums/79-real-estat...Article on guru courses and why they might or might not be a good plan:http://www.biggerpockets.com/renewsblog/2012/05/25...Maybe consider a budget of a few hundred, but don't spend thousands of dollars that could otherwise be spent on purchasing your first investment.

I am looking for any ideas I can evaluate and present to this seller to make this work for both of us.  

If so, from an appraisal standpoint, they would both be evaluated using the sales comparison approach as SFR.

That would be point number 1.Point number 2 is, you haven't provided any of the numbers necessary to evaluate a deal.

Can I trust you to evaluate and manage risk appropriately?

I still have a lot of evaluating to do but I wanted to reach out to BP to get some thoughts.  

For now, I'm inclined to disregard these and hope for better catches later, but if I *don't* get such, I might have to fall back on such as this, and figure out how to evaluate the situation...

This is a trick for helping you to quickly evaluate dozens or hundreds of deals without spending agesdoing so.

Keep on educating yourself, keep evaluating deals, look for a agent that will work with you.