When a dispo partner wants to take the assignment and pay the wholesaler after closing, that is backwards

The structure he proposed makes you an unsecured creditor of your own deal. Once he's the assignee of record and the closing disburses the full $16,000 to him, your $8,000 is a promise enforceable only by suing him for less than the cost of suing him.

The version that pays you at the table: you stay the assignor of record on a single assignment to his end buyer, and both of you sign a joint disbursement instruction to the closing agent splitting the assignment fee $8,000 and $8,000 on the settlement statement. Your partner's concern about buyer contact is handled by a non-circumvention clause in the JV agreement plus letting him run every buyer conversation. He doesn't need to be on the paper to control the relationship. Whether the closing agent will disburse to a party who isn't on the assignment varies by company and by state, so get that confirmed in writing before you rewrite anything.

If he genuinely won't expose the buyer, the other route is a double close with transactional funding, where he buys at $142,000 and resells at $158,000 in two separate closings. That costs you a second set of closing costs plus the funder's fee, often quoted as a flat charge or a percentage of the loan, and it eats a visible chunk of $16,000. Price it before you agree to it.

The $2,500 is the other thing to fix. As written, if his buyer defaults you carry the entire deposit loss on a fee you're splitting evenly. Either he matches half the deposit or the JV agreement says a buyer default splits the loss.

Separately, your $158,000 to a buyer who needs $30k of work leaves them at $188,000 against a $215,000 ARV. That's tight enough that a retrade at day ten is the likely outcome, not the surprise.

The earnest money point is what I'm stuck on generally. I'm still working out what the first deal costs me and I'd assumed a JV meant the risk was shared by default. Reading this, the deposit sits wherever the acquisition person's bank account is unless somebody writes it down. Quarry, did he offer anything toward the $2,500 or did that only come up now?