How to Partner with on Deals

[Aaron Andersen]

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.