Best methods for starting out in Multi-family

[Bradley R Stillabower]

I'm just a few weeks into the 6-12 months I'm giving myself to get educated on REI before I have access to capital and start making decisions and (potentially) taking action.

Generally, I plan to 

- spend most of my time being very diligent and involved in front-end analysis of deals, while 

- being minimally-involved (passive) in the back-end property management.  

So I'm mostly being drawn to multi-family properties, buy-and-hold, starting with small residential properties for the first 3-5 years (starting with a house-hack for my daughter, and potentially another for my recently-widowed MIL), and after a few more small residential properties then maybe scale slightly to a couple small apartment properties.  In total, an initial acquisition phase for 5-8 years, followed by up to 10 years of debt paydown, then free-and-clear retirement cash-flow before finally passing it all down to the kids and/or (future) grandkids to enjoy/deploy/sustain/grow the equity to good use.

My question is:  what is best method(s) (for me) to start with (in sequence or in parallel) for the first few properties/deals:

A.  passively invest in a syndication deal(s)

B.  purchase from a complete turnkey provider

C.  a turnkey purchase but self-manage for a period of time

D.  a hands-on "manual" purchase:  find an agent/broker/lender team and do the deal hunting/analysis directly with them

Keeping in mind I'll be working a full-time W2 job in the meantime, at least for the next 4-7 years before retirement at age ~60-63.

Thank you, appreciate any insights

Brad