EB-5 Investor Testimonial:
Deepak from India

Sure. Thank you very much, Sam. I think I never thought about that I would ever think of shifting to the U.S. and I should explore any such kind of option. So it was more like I was at a platform—I was at an age where I had to decide that where my kids, when they grow up, where should they be studying. And I figured out that the U.S. is one of the good places where they should study when they go to university or college. And irrespective of if I went to the U.S. or not, they would be going there. So I thought, “Is there an option available where going to the U.S. for this study become easier?” So I started researching on Google, and that’s where I came across EB-5. This is one of the option, and it’s competitively faster than anything else. A plus factor was more about that I can have this and always have it as a backup with me, irrespective of whether these guys settle in U.S. or not, they settle in U.S., they go to the U.S. to study or not. So that’s what basically made me attracted towards EB-5.

As a background, I’ve been an entrepreneur for 10, 15 years and have traveled a lot in all different countries. And that’s why I thought maybe to get global exposure to my kids, because that would make them give an edge when they grow up and when they enter into industry. So that’s how all of this came up.

Yes.

I think first time when I came across this option, it was more of a surprise for me. I thought, “How could someone just invest X amount of money and get a Green Card?” Because all the thing that I had in my mind or from a previous experience—because in India a lot of people go to the U.S., apply for H-1, and then they’re waiting for 15 years for their Green Card. And I thought that is how everybody gets a Green Card. But when I came across this option that, hey, you can put some money, invest and you can get a Green Card as an investor in a much shorter period of time, I was pretty surprised at that point of time. And I thought, “This is not possible, because this is something which somebody has written with less experience, less knowledge. There should be more to it.”

So I did more research, and the more research I did, all this came to be true, that this is actually possible. And then in my network, I asked more people, and I found out that yes, a lot of people have used this particular option. So that made me more comfortable that this is better rather than waiting for 15 years through the other visas that are available, whether it is EB-1, -2, -3, or whatever is out there. So that’s how it came up.

Yeah. I think how it started was I met someone in India who came to my office, and he met me and he said that “Hey, we represent this organization. We help in EB-5.” And I think they were representing a particular EB-5 project. And he told me some information about it, and he says that “I’m going to connect to you with some of the attorneys which we work with.” And he actually connected me with a few attorneys, and they just sent me a quote, “Hey, we are going to charge you X amount of dollars,” and then never got back to me with “Do you have any questions? Are you facing any problem while you will work with us or not work with us?” And I thought, “Is this how all the attorneys are like that? Just send a quote and until you don’t say yes or don’t pay them money in advance, they’re not going to be considerate about you?” And that was pretty surprising.

And then I kept talking to people, and somehow someone then connected me to Fragomen. And when I had a chat with them, it was less about “Engage us. This is how much we charge.” It was more about answering all the questions that I had. And there was no push for EB-5. It was like “Hey, this is one option. There’s another option that is there. Let us figure out which one is best for you.” So it was a very, very helping nature. So then that’s how I decided that I should go with an attorney who is trying to solve my problem rather than just fill the EB-5 form for me and file it at the government office. So my major criteria for selecting a particular law firm was: are they really interested in me or just my application?

I think I started working—my initial discussion was with Mitch. And I think he’s a senior attorney. Then he told me that he’s going to pass me over to one of his partners, John. And then after that, all of my discussion on my application was with John after that. And I would say that it was more when I had a talk with him in the first one hour itself. He actually understood what I do, from where the investment will come in, and what kind of problems I’m going to face. So I could sense that he has done so many applications that he knows where I will face a problem in my application collecting documents. So he was very quickly able to give answers to all my questions, as well as told me that what we really need and what I should not worry much about.

So the process was pretty smooth. After that, he sent me a list of documentation that they required, and I think at my side, if I combined everything, it would’ve taken nine hours in total to collect all the documents, not more than that. Of course, a period was one month which took to get all the things that they needed. But in terms of hours, I would’ve spent not more than nine hours for everything.

I think the first would be the availability of the immigration attorney. So when I say availability, as I told you, when I talked to a couple of the others, they were not replying to my email. They were not interested in me applying that much that they will ask me a question if I was having a problem or not. Because in between then, they send you a long list of documents that are required. Not everything you will have handy. And you will have a lot of questions that “If this is not there, can this work?” and things like that. And that particular attorney should be available for answering all those questions within a day or within two days or get on the call. Here, I found out that, when I was working with John, he was quickly give me a call and answer, or he will tell me within one hour itself the answers to the question that I had.

So I think that really creates a huge difference, because when you’re going through a process and you’re investing a lot of money, anxiety is always there at every step. And you need someone who basically takes you through that anxiety and answers all the question that you have. I think that plays a huge role. And of course, because this program, the EB-5 program, is there for years, if you have someone who has handled a lot of applications in the past, he knows what will be the problem that will come up with the government authorities based on his experience. I would say go with the one who has a lot of experience and has a personal people side of it as compared to purely professional and “I will charge you for all the hours that I spend with you.” So I think those two things really mattered a lot to me personally.

Yeah, sure. I think my criteria was very simple from the start: if I’m investing my money, I want a project that gives me returns and does not fail in a way. So I actually looked at all the projects and all the regional centers that are there. I had to talk with them, and my first preference was of course, [that] which has less risk and has a good success rate. So I was inclined more towards urban, which is very obvious because urban would be having a high success rate. And I had a look at a lot of urban projects.

And the next criteria I looked at was that it should not be a project which is just getting started because, if it’s just getting started, it has a high chances of failure also—not high chances of failure, but it has a high risk that it can stop at any point of time. There are a lot of factors through which it may not work out in the end.

So I started removing the projects which are going to start after one or two years of the investment because they’re in a very initial planning stage. I wondered that the construction has already started, or is half there, and things like that. So that reduced a lot to a very small number of projects in the end. But while I was going through it, I also came across some statistics that I was tracking very closely, some of the stats that were posted on the blogs like Lucid, etc., where it was given that what is the current rate looks like, that if people are applying in urban, then how long it’s going to take for you to get a Green Card.

And in February, I came across that that number has already reached five years, estimated. Nobody knows accurate, but it was five years. And, from my research, it showed that the people who applied in EB-5 before the old way, when 500K was the investment, they sometimes had to wait for seven years and 10 years. I didn’t want to get into that particular cycle of unknowingness, that “What is going to happen?” So I quickly shifted from urban to the rural one. So I was very, very close to investing in one urban project, and I had to change it in February. So I came back to the start, scratch at zero, and then I started to look at all the rural ones.

Now, when I was going through all the rural projects, there were many projects which were in mountains, for example, which would be building a resort or a hotel or things like that. Some, construction was not started. So again, I removed all the ones where construction had not started to minimize the risk factor. Then I was less interested in resort, because resort was again of a type where a lot had to be done to make it successful. So then I removed all the resorts as well. And then, in the end, I came across a few projects which were left, like the housing one, which was the one which EB5AN has, Twin Lakes.

So this was one of the one which was prominently looking at, one which had everything that I was looking at. So when I say everything, that means it has a very good history. It was not a blank site where it is projected that the houses are going to be made. It had people who had already invested and also got an approval on EB-5. That means that was also a plus factor. So all the things. It was very close to Atlanta’s downtown. That means there are a lot of people who would be shifting—it is not going to get … It is not that far-away land in mountains that nobody would want to buy a house over there. So it was a high-success project that I found out.

So in the end, I actually shortlisted two. One was Twin Lakes, and there was one other project which was related to providing internet connection to the rural area. That is where when you ask about my business background, these were the two ones which I was very close to. And then I figured out that that internet project is going to take five to six years to finish, and based on my estimate, that five to six years—everywhere, Starlink can come up and they can provide internet wire satellite, and that project can go bust if this happens.

So then I actually left that project. Because everything was good in that project in a way, so then that means in a project you have to also evaluate in five to seven years what is going to happen. And that’s why I moved to Twin Lakes in the end, and it satisfied all my parameters from that standpoint.

I think since this project already had a valid approval from the government, so I thought that that would not be a problem for the follow-on extension of the project. So it was very little emphasis, because I looked at the history to see that, “Will this be a problem or not?” So that is how I looked at this particular parameter of job creation.

I think it was pretty important because some of the other projects where I was considering, there were a few developers which were pretty big, but when you search about them on the internet, there were a few news that was coming on that they defaulted the loan or some projects failed. So you want to bank on someone who has not had any such kind of history. So it mattered. And I rejected a few because of the developer having one or two such cases in the past. So in this case, it was all positive. So that’s why I went ahead with it with Kolter.

I think I used a very similar criteria with the regional center as well—is this regional center going to just need me for my application, or is he really interested in helping me, kind of thing? So whatever I use the parameter for selecting the attorney, immigration attorney, I use the same over here. Whenever I was talking to any regional center—some regional centers actually replied me after a week or after four days. That means if I faced any problem during my investment or if I need more documents or during the phase when the application is going on, if they take such a time to reply, I don’t want to depend on them. So one of the criteria was actually that they should care more about me rather and not just my money. So whenever, let’s suppose I interacted with EB5AN, I got a very quick response within a couple of hours itself—I should not even say a day. So that was a very big factor for me.

And this was not just before I invested. It was after the investment also. If I had any query, it was very quick to get a response from you guys. So that played a very big parameter. Being in business myself and consulting, this is a huge trust factor—if you raise anxiety of the people at the other end, they don’t trust you, no matter how good you are. The second was, again, the history. That means, historically, there are a lot of projects that have been successful. That was another criteria. And I think the bigger role that played was a lot of regional centers were there as a middleman. Of course they help you invest, but all my learning about EB-5 was done [mostly] by all the knowledge that was provided by EB5AN’s website.

So a huge trust actually got developed from there. Every question that I had in my mind, whenever I used to search for it on Google or try to ask, all the answers were available. And it was not very biased way. It was a very unbiased manner—”Hey, if you are this particular type, you should consider these kind of projects.” It was not necessarily “Consider only our projects.” So someone who is actually more interested in giving value to you and helping you create, actually, that matters more to me actually. So in all the regional centers, nobody was interested in coaching me and answering my queries. They were just interested in investing in their project. But I found it a little bit different in the case of EB5AN. And that’s why that was a factor for me going with you guys.

Actually, most of them, I think I found out that it is very much “business processized”. Either it was a very young associate whose job is to just take you through the slide deck and tell you about the project, which is any real estate kind of business. They were not running an EB-5 regional center kind of thing. So if you ask any other question apart from the project, they were not aware of it. Which was they are just there doing their job—they are not just interested in you or in your future. So there was one, was that kind of thing. Another was that, even if there were some senior people involved in the project, I could see that they have just joined either two, three years back. And after two, three years back, they may not be there.

So you are right. There was no such … I didn’t get a chance to talk to any principal in any of the regional centers actually. It was mostly someone who was hired either two years back or four years back or an associate or five years. They were all guys who did a job. And I don’t know if after my investment they would still be there or not. So I have to maybe write to info@regionalcenter.com to know what is my status or if I have to ask a question—there would be no name—which was again making me very nervous in the end.

Which was not the case with here, Sam. I was interacting with you. You were very fast in replying to me and all that stuff, which boosted my confidence a lot. And that’s how in my business also it was the same. If I’m working with a client, I’m myself always available there, and it gives them a huge confidence that the founders of the company are involved. That means nobody can screw them very easily. And because the founders take care of reputation a lot, they would not let any mistakes slide. Which I found out a lot with you as well. I got the same vibe from you. And that attracted me more towards EB5AN.

I think I would say use something similar mechanism, because when we invest, of course, we are investing in a project, but also investing in the people who are involved in the project. So it may be that, in some cases, a project may appear very, very lucrative. But I would still say that, give 50% investments to the people who are involved in the project. If you can’t talk to the people who are involved and if they don’t care about you, they can basically anytime screw you up, no matter how good the project or documents look like. I would say that, hiring an attorney or hiring a project give a lot, at least 50% give emphasis to the people who are involved. That’s the only thing. Otherwise, everybody may have their own risk appetite and return and everything. So I would say only people would be more important I guess.

I think how soon you’re getting your money back and how much is the interest rate. Those two things should matter to you. But there is a huge range I figured out over the period of time. I also met a few regional centers who were giving a very high rate of return, and they were also giving the money back in a much shorter time period, but I chose not to go with them. And it was, again, risk, the risk appetite that was there, and the experience that was associated at that time. So I would say when we are choosing the project, choose the one which is not in a very nascent stage. It has already picked up and started. You can see the construction going on, or it is half-baked? I would say that that would be a very important factor, which I would say you should look at if someone is investing at this point of time.

And if you can get a chance to go and see the place, that particular project, nothing better than that, because the confidence that you can get when you have visited is a huge, I would say day-and-night, difference as compared to when you’re looking at the slides and the projects. At least for me, it mattered a lot.

Yeah, I really appreciate that, Sam. I think the small things that was done during the course created a very good experience. So, for example, just getting the documentation from you, for example, for the project where I had to fill in and sign when I was subscribing for other projects, they also send me the same documentation, but I had to fill in everything in that documentation—my name, my passport number—and you have to fill it multiple times. And I thought it’s okay because, when you’re investing, you have to fill in all the details so that they’re correct. But when I received from you, similar kind of thing, it was already filled in. That means there was some guy who actually took my passport and all the details and he filled all the places where my name had to be written, my passport number has to be written, and things like that.

Now, there was no need for you to do that, but it was like you wanted to remove all the friction points that would come up to me and you’re saving that particular time. It was such a subtle thing that most people ignore. So it was more of like having a … In future also, if I face any problem’ I’m assuming that there’s the same experience that I may get. So these several things I think matter a lot when you are working with someone who’s really good. It’s like you’re working with a doctor. And if a doctor is taking care of very, very small things, you know he’s a good doctor. So I would say it’s very similar like that. So there’s a very good experience working with you guys.