We have some capital gains this year and read about opportunity zones and how they can partially and permanently remove tax payments on capital gains depending on how long you hold the investment. I am looking to potentially buy and manage a property (goal is a medical office building or something similar) and was wondering if anyone had any advice on searching for these properties? My goal is finding a property in the South Carolina area, within an hour of Hilton Head Island. Are there certain sites where you can look up these areas? Or do you have to reach out to realtors who have knowledge in that area? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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Hi David.  Lets connect.  I know of areas and projects.

@David Anderson

Being able to defer the gain from putting it into a Qualified opportunity zone is not as simple as buying a property within the zone.

Regarding finding the designated tracts, you can likely type into google "<insert county/state> qualified opportunity zone tracks"

You likely want to work a tax professional who specializes in qualified opportunity zones to make sure you are following the book.

Some of the steps include

1) Funding the entity with capital gains within 180 days
2) Self-designation as a QOF
3) buying a property within a Qualified opportunity zone
4) Rehab the property for atleast the cost of the building
5) satisfy periodic asset testing
6) satisfy holding period requirement
7) etc etc etc

If you are looking for commercial properties, go to loopnet.com.  Within their search criteria, they have a filter for whether the property is in an Opportunity Zone or not. It comes in really handy.  There are a couple of other ways to do it if you have a specific property in mind and want to check if it's in an OZ or not.  The site eig.org has an OZ interactive map where you can put in an address or gps coordinates and it will show if it's in an OZ. Also if you know the census tract # of the property, then there is an IRS or US Treasury web site which has a list of all the OZ census tracts - it's downloadable into a spreadsheet.  You can check your census tract against that list.  Hope that helps. 

Google QOZ list.  You can find the ZIP codes.

However, you're going to need to do a more than just buy a property there.  To get the breaks, you're going to have to plan on some major rehab.