I paid $4,800 to co-GP with someone who turned out to be coaching three other passive investors on the same deal structure at the same time.

The conflict of interest you named at the end is the sharpest part of this. A promote means the GP profits from the deal performing. A coaching fee means the GP profits from you being in the room. When both exist simultaneously, the GP has already extracted value before the first dollar of deal performance. That structure removes urgency to execute. You experienced exactly what that looks like.

The assumption doing the most work in deals like this is that the person teaching you has already absorbed the downside risk themselves. They haven't, if the coaching fee covers their cost basis and the promote is upside-only with investor capital holding the floor.

The thing you correctly identified but I'd sharpen: it's not just that the two fee structures are incompatible. It's that you need to see them disclosed together, in writing, before you commit capital. A single document that lists his GP compensation, the coaching fee, his ownership stake, and who absorbs losses in which order would have made the structure visible. Most people don't ask for that document. The friendship dynamic you described is exactly why it doesn't get produced unless someone demands it.

The self-written inspection summary is a separate failure, and a cleaner one to catch next time. No third-party report means no deal. That's a binary. The deferred maintenance not in the pro forma is also standard practice in bad deals, and the fix is a line-by-line reconciliation of the pro forma against the inspection before you wire anything. Tax and securities questions around how that coaching fee was structured relative to your LP position are worth running past a securities attorney, because the answer changes depending on how he characterized both.

What was the GP's disclosed ownership percentage on the operating agreement relative to what you understood verbally?