With that said I don't want to pass this one up, has anyone ever tried offering more and asking the seller to pay a significant portion of the down payment (85% of the 25% required).

I would opt for the CG under your direct control, let him/her deal with the nuts, bolts and subs.I had a fire and needed to r/r the upper unit en toto and a good portion of the lower from water damages - - $95k all total.I approved design choices and the GC implemented the products and services to fulfill those choices. 

Our reasoning behind possibly doing this, is we could concentrate our time on really developing our SOPs for the flip portion and get our feet wet.  

For example, snow plowing, lawn care, yard expenses, utilities, only the rental unit portions expense can be written off. 

And if we apply for a loan with 4 signers, we will be categories as an investment which makes the refinancing portion more difficult.

As for the course it self, here in Illinois it was a 350 page book (75 hour self taught portion), a 2 day webinar (15 hour guided), then you took a test to pass the course and finally the state test.  

I'd like to have more capital to work with for future deals so I'm leaning towards a flip (I also teach school and could do a significant portion of the work myself this summer) but am unsure if it may be more beneficial to sell the soon-to-be rental that won't likely be quite as profitable and use that money for a flip (I wouldn't meet my summer flip timeline then), get conventional financing, or use some other type of financing.  

I'm not going to get into it in this post, but you can save a huge portion of the closing costs by being clever.

@Emily Shirk the problem here is that you are only qualifying for the "ownership" portion of how a primary residence is defined.There are two parts to the "primary residence" definition: ownership and use.

@Jeremy Hunter luckily, it's a big area of land and I will be focusing on a small portion of it to hopefully weed out some of the competition, but yes it is a hot market!