Partner or Borrow from him?

[Shawn S.]

So it's pretty funny how I read on BP that once you get started in real estate investers will find you. Today I had a co-worker who told me he's been meaning to speak to me and he is very interested in what I'm doing in real estate. He has 30k sitting idle and he wants to do something with it. I have only bought one property so far, am working on numbers 2 and 3 currently. The strategy is buy and hold long term. Minimal rehab. He is unsure whether he would prefer to find a way to partner with me or to simply get a decent rate of return on his money that is currently sitting idle. My initial thought is to take the loan from him though he's a pretty solid guy as far as a possible partner would go on a property or two. Anyway, I was hoping to get thoughts here on which way you would consider first if you were me? Please also tell me if you went that way how you would go about structuring either scenerio. I'm curious what interest rate to offer him if it were simply a loan. I'm also curious whether to go in 50/50 on everything if it were a partnership, or perhaps just use his funds for the down payment on the properties since he would plan to be pretty uninvolved in the buying process etc.

Thanks,

Shawn

[J Scott]

What does he bring to the table other than the money that you can't do yourself or hire someone to do? If nothing, then a loan is the way to go. Unless he has some specific skill set, experience or connections that you can't get by hiring it out, I generally don't see any good reason to partner with someone, especially when you're relatively new to investing.