Speaker 1: Hello, my dear friends. This is Stanislav Shamaev, a licensed business immigration and corporate attorney in Miami, Florida. And today we're going to be discussing how you can get the investment visa to the U.S. investing in the real property. At the end of this video, you'll be able to learn how to get a free evaluation of your case from me. Something that other attorneys call a consultation and want to charge you $300. You'll get it absolutely free. Let's go. Okay, my friends, I get this question a lot. Stanislav, I have a million dollars, I have $500, I have $700, I have $2 million. Whatever the number is, it's the same desire to invest in a U.S. real estate, in U.S. properties. And I don't blame you guys because it's been proven that in the past, whenever you bought the property, of course, it could be a volatility, it could be a fluctuation in the market and, you know, you could buy and could drop immediately. But with the time it grows, it gets back. The rents are on the rise right now in the States. It becomes a really lucrative diversification of your portfolio and just good things to have in your investment portfolio, right? The United States property, apartments, the houses, the townhouses, the complexes, whatever it is. And of course, because you are entrepreneurial and you're a businessman and you're an investor and you're thinking, well, I'm already putting the money in the U.S. economy, purchasing the properties and the real estate. I'm already contributing. So do I have any option to maybe get an investment visa, maybe a working visa? Maybe even a green card, Lord knows. I can understand where these thoughts are coming from. So let's discuss if the fact of your investing your money in a real estate can bring you any good in the form of some kind of visa or maybe a green card. Let's discuss that. So we know that there are two main types of investment visas to the States. And the first one is EB-5 visa. This is a large investment visa where you could invest the minimum $800,000 or $1,050,000 to the U.S. economy, create 10 jobs, control this business and get a green card for your entire family. And of course, we have to prove this source of funds that your money is legal and you paid all the taxes on it. But the question becomes, if I invest $1,200,000 in properties, will that count towards my investment? Well, it could, but there are a few problems. Problem number one, I don't see how you can create 10 permanent jobs just investing in the property. You just buy the property and you put the tenants in it and you kind of get the passive investment. Yes, of course, there is some maintenance part of it, but I don't see how you can create 10 jobs, even if you have 10 properties, right? That's trouble number one. Trouble number two, and I think it's even more significant in the term of EB-5 program. Besides the proof of funds, there's another criterion in this program that's called that your investment should be at risk. You can lose that investment partially or fully if you're not successful. So buying the property, which is a very liquid asset, is not at risk. You may lose a little bit when you resell, but most likely you're even going to make some money. So investing in property in itself does not render you qualifying for the EB-5 visa. Same with E-2 visa. With E-2 visa, it's much lower investment, starting with $100,000. There could be less amount of money, but $100,000 is a good start. For $200,000, you can probably buy a little shed in Miami. We know that, right? But if you go to Kentucky, maybe some other state, nothing against those states, the price is going to be cheaper, right? So you may be thinking, OK, I'll buy and then I'll start buying more and this and that. Same concept applies. OK, maybe it's not about the jobs anymore, but it's more about the risk. E-2 has also component of risk of investment. And if it's only real property, then it's not going to count. Probably the 20% of your investment may count toward your investment, even if it's real estate, especially if it's in the commercial real estate. And probably most likely it's in the commercial real estate. Let's say you buy an office for the operation of your company and you're going to put 10 people here to work from. There we go. If it's about 20% of your whole investment, that's going to count towards it, right? But not more than that. And only in this narrow situation. But there are ways where you can use some of your money, where you could combine purchasing properties, residential properties and your investment visa. That's probably going to go to E-2 visa specifically, because again, for EB-5, it's going to be much, much harder. It's always a good start with E-2 visa, with the plans to scale in the future. You may well go for E-2 visa in the beginning and then see what's going on in the future. So how can we use real estate investment in E-2 visa? For example, you purchase five apartments, right? Five apartments for $200,000 and you invested a million dollars and now you want to get a visa. We are not going to use your investment in the property at all for the purpose of E-2 visa. Meaning you will have to come up with another $100,000 or more. So we create a company and we call it a maintenance company that is going to maintain those five apartments in the beginning. You follow my thought, right? We don't use these five apartments in the petition directly, but we say that there is a separate LLC or a separate C-corp that is a maintenance company that maintains the U.S. properties. And look, we already have five contracts to maintain those properties and we want to grow, we want to become bigger. So this is a really good start. Of course, it's not as simple as it may sound, but it's much easier than trying to get E-2 visa just buying the properties, which is probably impossible to get E-2 visa to this extent, to this effect. The biggest difficulty in the maintenance company is to spend $60,000, maybe $70,000 before we file the petition. And you know that this is a must. We cannot just put the money in the company and say, hey, we invested. No, we have to spend the significant part of it, the majority of this money. So if you rent the office, if you buy the furniture, if you hire one or maybe already two people, the cleaning lady and the administrator, you build a website, you do some marketing campaign, you write a business plan, you put some money in research, we already get really close to $60,000-$70,000, especially if you need to buy a vehicle, because people need to get around to go to the apartment, to fix things, to clean things, to welcome the new tenants and things like that, especially if you do Airbnb and stuff like that. From this perspective, that's not really hard to spend even more than $100,000, but probably $60,000-$70,000 will be enough. If we're speaking about EB-5 visa, this is a much larger spending. So we need to show how within two years we will be able to invest a million dollars in this maintenance company. And again, I don't say that it's impossible. All I say, it's really hard in my eyes, because I can see the scale of the amount of properties that needs to be serviced by 10 people. Again, not impossible, but much harder. But I know you guys are talented, you're good investment people, you may have an idea how you can grow that business. And if you ask me, for example, how I would structure this LLC for EB-5 visa, it would be those 10 employees. Let's put a hypothesis. So let's say we have one general manager who is going to manage all these people. You have a marketing person who is going to do the marketing campaign in your company. Then you have, let's say, three cleaning ladies, right? So that's already five people. Then you have a repair guy who is going to go and repair stuff. Then you have an administrator who answers the calls and communicates with the clients. That's already seven. A separate person could work with those leads. You may have a customer experience person who is going to help to communicate with the customers, write the scripts for the customers, create the templates for the communication for the customers. And you have an accountant in the company, right? Because when you have 10 people, it makes sense to bring an in-house accountant, but not to use the outsourced one. Then you got the 10 jobs in your company. And it may have sounded difficult before, but now you have a really good picture how you can invest in a real estate in the United States of America and get one of the investment visas. E2 is a non-immigrant, allows you to stay perpetually in the States. And EB-5 visa is the visa where you can get a green card for your entire family. If you think that you satisfy the criteria of E2 visa or EB-5 visa, and not necessarily in a real estate, it could be any other business, go down below this video and fill out the questionnaire that I prepared for you and do it very detailed so I can give you the best free evaluation of your case. And then I will invite you to the immigration planning, where we will build your strategy of filing your case and getting approval for your visa. Please subscribe to my YouTube channel. Don't miss my Instagram and my TikTok, where I put a lot of very good, available and entertaining content for you. I am Stanislav Shamaev, the lawyer of the future. Your future begins here. Good luck.