@Philip Pape If he is providing all of the money, coordinating the rehab, and bringing all of the experience I think you should pretty much be OK with whatever structure he wants to go with and use it as a valuable learning experience.At minimum If I were in his shoes I would want you to be a personal guarantor on the refi side, deal with the back end selling of the property, and to deal with all of the day to day maintenance once stabilized to even think about giving you 50% of the deal.  

Put yourself in his shoes....a guy you've never met, that lives 8 hours away, wants you to work for free, and "promises" to pay you on time.

You can't be running around telling these guys to tie their shoes every morning.

So, if you were in my shoes, how would YOU go about orchestrating things? 

I'm going to disagree with this statement...While a GC would certainly want you to believe that having him as a partner is the best situation, in reality this is just the best situation for the GC, not the investor.Put yourself in the shoes of the investor -- if you had a choice between bidding the job out to a GC for a fixed price or partnering with a GC for a percentage of the profits, why would you ever go the partner route?

I do however do a small square tile area near the main entrance to the house where people would normally come in and take shoes off.

Kids would tie my shoes while I fell asleep in the bus.

No commingling of funds prevents a state audit while they look for "use" tax issues and start charging business tax on your daughters new shoes.

You have to think in their "shoes", "what if this person can't pay his mortgages?"

Do you plan on stepping out one day and having someone else fill your shoes and you become just the owner of the company?