You may lose a little, but you'll keep your sanity! 

@Michael Ansley this deal seems a little off-balance to me... you're taking the risk of losing the security of your job but if you're not producing enough this company will toss you out after a few weeks... why don't you try it part-time and see if you're good at it first? 

That means that if you put a great tenant in one side, and the other side gets a bad tenant, you might risk losing your good tenant because of someone else's poor decisions.If you control both sides, and one tenant starts to turn bad, you can evict them so that you don't lose both tenants and you can limit any risk to your property and tenants.

Knowing the red flags of scams will decrease your chance of being a victim of a scam and possibly losing out on a lot of money.

However, they can only lose what they put in.

Maybe I'm not setting my sights high enough? 

For instance say its $2500, he'd be losing out on potentially $1000 instead of renting both units separately.

The only money I’m losing at this point is for the inspection.

That's a lot.You can also lose out on other deductions too. 

The biggest factor or problem that I see is that sometimes people don't set their sights high enough, they get lost in the details worrying more about $$$ versus %, or they shoot for an industry versus the product.