Silent Partner Real Estate Investing

Thicken My Wallet asked me a while ago to post more about the multi-use building that I was involved in purchasing as a silent partner, and my experience doing that sort of deal. Just to be clear, what I mean by silent partner is someone who puts money into an investment, but isn’t involved in the day-to-day management of it.

Some time ago a buddy of mine, who has been holding my hand while I learn about real estate, contacted me with info about a building he’d found in a small Ontario town he lives near. He sent me the general building info, and it seemed pretty good ($400K, bar and retail store on the main floor and rooming house upstairs).

My friend likes to be pretty aggressive with real estate, so he never has enough cash to buy everything he’d like to. He also likes to mortgage to the hilt so that he has as much possible cash for the next purchase as possible. Given this, he’s quite open to partnering with people (and has done so successfully in the past with his sister’s boyfriend).

I told him it looked interesting, asked for an income statement (which seemed too good to be true, but we verified it). We put in an offer conditional on a property inspection (and my buddy negotiated a vendor-take-back mortgage).

After the inspection was completed (and we managed to get $25K knocked off the purchase price due to some potential problems turned up by the report), we set up a corporation (my buddy took care of all this), and recently completed the purchase.

Originally my friend was planning to live there himself, so he was going to manage it in exchange for living rent free, but in the end he changed his mind, and what we decided would be fair would be that we’d pay him 10% of the gross rent to manage it (and treat this the same as any other property expense), then we’d split everything else 50/50. I live in Toronto so wouldn’t have been able to do any of the management duties.

I went to tour the building, but for the most part deferred to my friend’s experience. This isn’t necessarily a course I’d recommend to everyone, but I’ve known this guy for about a decade (we met at university) and I was in his wedding party, so I’m willing to trust is judgement.

There’s a fine line to walk between doing business with someone you’re close enough to trust, but not doing business with someone you’re so close to that it might jeopardize the friendship. Some people trust more easily than I do, and some people are more able to do business and keep the friendship out of it than I can. For me there’s a pretty narrow range where business and friendship intersects (and I’m always nervous when I’m in that territory).

As an example, I could see my brother suggesting him and I buy property together (with him as the silent partner). I’d be very uncomfortable doing this, as if anything went wrong with the deal, I could see it causing problem with the relationship (and I don’t want to lose my brother over money). On the other extreme, whenever you go to “real estate networking” events, you’ll find TONS of people who are very excited to partner with you on deals. I’d say if you’re that sick of your money, just send it to me instead of losing it to them.

We’re still in the early stages of managing the property, so I’ll post more details in the future once figures start rolling in (and mention if we run into any problems).

I’m writing this late at night the night before posting, so I may have left out important details. Please let me know if there’s any holes in the story and I’ll be happy to fill them in! 🙂