You need a mentor and need deal flow and volume and experience more than you need big whopper sales.

I've been looking pretty hard daily at properties.

Scrolling through real estate listings is something that I have done daily since I was in middle school and had purchased probably 50+ house plan books even before then.

I was able to place a tenant rapidly and had multiple walk-ins daily during the construction process where prospects inquired about renting the property. 

@Alexander M Stanton Are you taking a big hit in volume due to all of the uncertainty with the local universities? 

The plan will be to practice analyzing properties daily so we can start figuring out what good deals look like.

Due to the volume that they handle, it can get convoluted to talk to any living human being that has the authority to "make a deal" with you unless you are an institutional buyer.

Within a very short time you will have learned so much it will make your head spin, as long as you work with professionals as they will already be at some level of scale and volume, and gained valuable network connections.

There have also been some comments about how noisy it is all around the condo, as the eating area and living spaces all have laminate flooring (with bad padding), but the noises from daily living operations are bearable (although noisy) for the unit owner below. 

If you google “tax active dealer real estate” you will give you a bunch of links that have the 9 facts and circumstance determination rules of how the irs determines if you were dealing or investing...If you have a higher volume flips, you could use S Corp status to try to avoid some of the fica taxes.