You are a landlord and have to treat it as such.Insurance and taxes typically only go up, so make provision in your lease agreement to make sure that the lease payment is sufficient to cover the probable increase.

I don't like the tax treatment though since it's treated as ordinary income.

That said, an LLC could elect to be treated for US Tax purposes as an S-Corporation or a Corporation. 

I am just starting my REI journey so I cannot speak from personal experience on what I have done, but I used to practice corporate law and a LLC definitely serves a purpose.One thing I have not seen mentioned (though I might have missed it) is that you have to be careful not to co-mingle personal assets and you must treat the LLC as a truly separate entity.

But treat it as you would any investment.

So I would definitely treat the first few projects as a "Shadow-GC". 

You can't treat him differently (including better) because of age..

We'll do 25+ deals in the market so agents and GCs see an opportunity to scale and they treat the relationship with a ton of respect. 

Also, business cards are evaluated differently and high balances aren't treated as severely, if at all.My main concern is how to structure a deal so these get paid back in a timely manor.

Although you live in one of the units, you are treating the other like a business presumably and will be reporting income and expenses for tax purposes so you really should have a separate bank account.