Need Advice on Structuring a Partnership

[Joel Ness]

I'm a new investor looking to make my first buy-and-hold deal in the Houston area but I would not be eligible for a conventional mortgage to finance it. While I have excellent credit and plenty saved up for a down payment on what I'm looking for, I've been in and out of work and don't have two years worth of solid W-2s.

One of my plans for solving this is to find someone with exactly the opposite problem: someone who has great credit and work history but not enough saved up for a down payment. We could cosign a mortgage, I would make the full down payment and we would work out a profit split.

However, it feels like in this situation I would be taking almost all the risk since I would be the only one with initial equity. If (god forbid) a foreclosure was to occur, I would lose far more and this feels like it would give my partner inherently less motivation to make the property work for both of us.

My question is: are there any ways to mitigate this and institute repercussions for failure on both parties, legal or otherwise?