Drawing Capital Real Estate Investment: Fees

[ChromePony]

So my friend and I have some Real Estate experience on a personal level (we own and rent a small apartment building) and are thinking of committing to it more seriously. We'd like to look into acquiring a bigger property and have a number of friends/family/acquaintances who have mentioned that they would be interested in investing in this venture.
Right now we can think of two basic scenarios with some other variations probably possible as well.

A: Buy a X unit complex and rent it out/manage it.

B: Buy a X unit complex and convert units to condos for sale.

This is all very preliminary, but we're wondering how we might structure our payment or fees into the deal for taking care of all the legwork. For plan B it seems it would make the most sense to take a cut of the final profits, how much is considered standard here? Plan A seems a little trickier since there is no liquidation of the asset. We could take partial equity and a management fee? We want to be more than just property managers though, focusing our efforts on finding good deals, pooling the investments and improving the units as necessary. At which point we may just hand over management to a professional company anyway.

I've done a little research on the matter and have some general ideas but I'm curious to hear some untainted 2+2 input as well, so I'll leave that out for now.

[dsmith19711]

Now is probably a much better time for option A than for option B.

You probably want to set up an SPV with two classes of shares that apportion earnings differently between the two classes. Or you and your friend can buy all of the shares of the SPV at x, and then sell some of them to investors at x+profit. Plus, the SPV can be used as a liability shield in the event of problems.

You can also charge a management fee, but again, you'll probably want an SPV as the management company for liability purposes. It might be hard to get a management company to take on a single building - a super is probably going to have to suffice if you don't want to do it.

[NajdorfDefense]

You're about 30 months late on Option B.