When buying a property with 20% down, your appreciation is based on 100% value.

2) As a partial year resident, do I just include the resident portion of taxable income in the base, rather than use the non-resident worksheet? 

Be very careful w private real estate syndications, some great ones, some really not great ones, and takes years of investing experience/understanding debt/property management/taxation rules etc before you should safely go that route, but then they can be awesome as they give high yields w passivity, the Holy Grail of RE investing :)you are on the right path, and RE far less complicated than the Krebs Cycle too :)

I'm looking to get a loan for my first non-owner occupied rental property but my current lender is telling me my debt to income ratio is too high due to my student loans and mortgage.

I meant 10% down based on SD multi-family real estate prices.

Questions I'd have if I were in your shoes would be based around how the CAM expenses, management, taxes etc are going to work. 

An additional benefit of a detailed engineering-based Cost Segregation Study is that it can increase potential insurance premium savings as well as provides support for the property tax appeals process.Additionally, it can help maximize renovations and improvements.A Cost Segregation study is an IRS approved federal income tax tool that increases near term cash flow by utilizing shorter recovery periods for depreciation to accelerate return on investment.

Projected returns based on entry cap may be high but actually making those returns is very tough.

If they don’t spread this messaging they won’t have a captured audience of  paying students.Now what happens when you use credit card debt to buy real estate and you can’t sell the home or you can’t refinance or you can refinance but you can’t pull out the credit card debt?

Based on the above projections I receive, I then "run the numbers" to see where I project to end up each month.