How to Partner with on Deals

How to Partner with on Deals

Olympia, WA · Member since 2015 · 7 posts · 2 votes

I have a friend/college I've been working with for years in other lines of business but want to partner up with on RE deals. How best do I do that exactly? I've been doing some reading on RE partnerships, LLC's etc... but I've come up with some specific questions. My partner is the "deal finder" of the two of us, and would be the person to find deals + manage rehabs as needed, and I'd be the one to figure out the financing, manage accounting, and do all the nitty-gritty business/operations stuff. So, basically, she's "lines em up" and I "knock em down". We both have capital, so we plan to fund the deals 50/50 and split the responsibilities + profits 50/50 also. Eventually, once we're cooking, we plan to get some other investor who wants to make a return on their money to fund the down payments and we do everything else, so we can scale faster.

So my questions are: 

- What's the best business structure for this? Real Estate Limited Partnership, LLC, etc??

- The biggest question that keep coming up on my mind, we want to scale this to include a lot of properties with mortgages, but I'm aware of the 10 freddie/fannie cap we each have, and if we're partnering on properties and thus the mortgages, that means each property would count towards our 10... so, in a world where she could get 10 and I could get 10 mortgages (20 total), this would mean we could only get 10 together (thus 10 total), which doesn't seem like we'd be leveraging that side of things as well. I've heard people mention to get commercial loans to avoid this OR get traditional mortgages, then plan to bundle them up with a portfolio lender later, but I've also read that's not a super easy approach. 

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  • Carl FischerPro Member
    Rental Property Investor · Ambler, PA · Member since 2015 · 2k+ posts · 1k+ votes
    6y

    @Aaron Andersen

    I’m not sure it is good to be partners. I’m not sure why your partner needs you. Scale together and help each other -but do your own deals. 

  • Realtor · Philadelphia, PA · Member since 2017 · 16 posts · 12 votes
    5y

    Aaron, 

    I completely disagree with Carl. I located this post because I am looking into how to properly partner with different people (even sometimes one deal at a time) so my situation is a bit different than yours. I do think an LLC would be a great "first" step for your professional RE relationship, make sure to lay out contributions and roles in your operating agreement as well.

    I have two pieces of advice related to your post. 

    1) If you do not think you can do this alone... 100% partner with someone on deals (as long as you can trust each other). This will create accountability and it seems like you both have pretty impressive complementary skill sets. 

    2) Start your LLC ASAP (if you plan on working together on multiple deals). The sooner you start your LLC --> the sooner you can start generating business credit --> the sooner you can leverage business LOCs, more creative financing!

    Good luck!

    -Hansel

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