Success - It's all in the Sizzle

We have seen over 60 new regional centers come on line this year with as many behind that. Each of these centers offer an equal number of EB5 projects, not counting developers leasing centers for their own projects.

What is the quality that separates the winners from the losers? Sizzle. Like a bright light on a Hollywood billboard, sizzle sells.

Our staff is on the road seven days a week meeting agents. They introduce projects, explain why they are superior models and how they will make the agents sales cycle shorter and more successful. We started the work thinking a superior loan model with an acceptable level of equity to debt and backed by an excess of job creation would create the perfect model. Not so.

Agents and investors alike are enormously suspicious of EB5 projects. Our business has collectively managed to generate a large count of 526 and 829 failures related to failing centers, blocked projects and a thunderstorm of RC generated RFE's. Most of these are connected to misrepresentation of investor risk, implied guarantees and leaky project data. Matched to this mess is USCIS’s consistently inconsistent interpretation of business plans and job modeling.

These days we see once bright alert investors falling asleep at presentations when regional centers work to make their case through persuasion, gifts, persuasion, dinners, persuasion and an abundance of shortage of hard data. Investors dutifully sign their forms, go home, and are never heard from again.

How can you hold the attention of agents and investors? I have a few ideas that may work for you.

1.             Don’t go to market unless your project is sellable!
                -              Balance equity (35%) to eb5 debt (35%) to conventional debt (30%)
                -              Balance project Pro’s and Con’s.
                -              If Con’s “outweigh” Pros, work your capital stack
                               Draw the columns back into balance or better yet, let Pro’s get more attention
                -              Give the investor a decent return
                -              Use a third party fund administrator to manage developer disbursements
                -              Let the investor choose their own legal representative

2.             Don’t go to market with a project that does not add to the esteem of the investor
                -              Look for unique, unusual, high profile projects
                -              High profile public projects
                -              Sporting venues
                -              Media projects
                -              University work
                -              Entertainment venues

When you start your process of screening your EB5 project, keep this in mind: EB5 is for green cards, investments are for value and prestige. Green cards are earned with cash and relatively clean source of funds analysis. Investments, well those are for Sports team complexes, media project, entertainment venues, universities and medical centers. Why? Each hold a degree of prestige and glamour and are almost impossible to buy into elsewhere.

When investors get together, talk inevitably turns to who is investing in what. The owner of the hottest project, stock tip or investment strategy is the toast of the evening. The same holds true everywhere else.

At the end of the day and all things being equal, the investor will choose the project that gives them bragging rights. At a card game, dinner party or mahjong table, the investment that shines the brightest also shines most brightly on its’ investor.

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China eb5 Immigration Pinnint kevin jeffers