Glad you pressed on and got a fantastic outcome.

Now sometimes a seller will counter right away and come down a bunch if they have a pressing need to sell ( bank foreclosure, short sale, partnership split, wants to 1031 into something else, reinvest equity into a development deal, take equity and expand a business they own buying and fixing up a new location, current loan coming due and bank will not extend anymore,etc.)You have to find out why the seller is selling. 

That agent sent me a threatening email the next day telling me that I was "everything that's wrong with our industry" and that she plans to press charges due to my "shady dealings".

In my view, there is no way to constitutionally enforce this rule but there is no pressing issue for the city council to delete it from the books.  

Yeah, I realized later that I did not press enough to find out what they wanted to for the property, I'm meeting them again and will try to find out.  

If you are clearing $662 a month, you are going to be hard pressed to beat that with all the other costs and time it will take to get another property online.  

So subject to does not work for this seller and the second option you propose gets us back to him waiting a long time to get his money.I know he would not sell the property if he didn’t have such pressing need right now.

When I was in college 7 years ago, you would be hard pressed to find a SFH for rent under $1500 per month.

He has an accounting background that could help us immensely and he is close enough to the area to be able to address pressing issues.

To John's point, the market in Columbus is so saturated, you'll be extremely hard pressed to find a fix and flip on the MLS, so you'll have to take alternative routes.