Find a distressed category of real estate to pursue and reach out to those sellers to see who wants to sell, then get it under contract.

I will come back to this and post more but finding a good realtor in Investment world is worth its weight in GOLD! 

If I only receive the down payment this year (let's say 20%) can I write off the entire 250k towards that and structure future years to try to get in lower LTCG categories than all at once?

What category does this fall under for financing?

Like Agents these guys and gals are worth their weight in gold.

This was very helpful Im lower on experience but higher in every other category.

@J ScottHi J Scott,I realize this is a general question and without hard numbers it falls under the category of it depends.

I know how much I can invest in each category.

At FlipSystem, most of our students start off by falling between those two categories: they want to be more than passive investors, but they do not have the knowledge or skillset to rely solely on real estate investing as their only source of income.

You could likely break things down further, but at the end of the day, your broad categories are covering it.