Starting a Partnership LLC for Investment Properties

[Chase Cadle]

Hello, I'm new to the forum and looking at investment properties in the Greater Louisville, KY and Southern Indiana Areas. A long life friend and I have finally reached a point in our lives where each of us can contribute the same amount of capital towards investing in some rental properties to hopefully generate passive income and supplement our retirements later in life. We wanted to start an LLC together with each party having 50% ownership in the company. The issue is getting that first loan on the first property and the learning curve of getting started on our dream of investing in real estate. We wanted to each contribute our capital to a newly generated bank account linked to our LLC but we have met with a few lending companies / banks and they were telling us that they would like to see at least 2 years of of tax returns on the company before they would consider giving us a commercial loan on an investment property. So, my questions are as follows:

1. What advice can you give as far as setting up the LLC and generating a partnership agreement for the LLC?

2. Would one of us have to put the first couple of properties in each of our own names and keep track of the finances ourselves until we reach year 3? And if so, then by year 3, could we refinance the properties we would currently have and merge them into the Account we would set up for the LLC? Or is there a way to stream line everything through the LLC right from the start with our first investment property? (Ideally this is what we wanted to do even with getting higher interest rates on loans to keep it simple and straight forward through the company instead of through our own personal finances)

Thank you in advance for any advice and recommendations!

- Chase Cadle

[Taylor L.]

What kind of properties are you asking them about? Potential loan balances?

Every property I've been involved with has had a loan issued to a new LLC w/o tax return history. Those loans do need guarantors, however. You have to meet net worth and liquidity requirements and sign on the dotted line that you agree to pay back the loan.

For legal docs, you need to talk to a lawyer. You may be able to find one in your area who specializes in the topic. 

I would suggest you generally shift your focus to finding acceptable properties over how you'll structure the deals when you find them. Find a deal then figure it out. You agree to split everything 50/50, that's good enough for now. A partnership agreement is probably a good idea at this stage, but starting LLCs and so forth can be a distraction from the nuts-and-bolts of doing deals.