Buying a house in the United States gives you an asset and nothing more. No visa comes attached to the deed. No work permit, no right to stay one day longer than your entry stamp allows. The only investment based route to a US green card is EB-5, and EB-5 pays no attention to what you own. What it examines is whether $800,000 or $1,050,000 of your capital sits genuinely at risk inside a new commercial enterprise that creates 10 full time jobs for qualifying US workers.
Property and EB-5 do touch, which is where the confusion begins. Most regional center offerings are construction deals, so your money often ends up financing a hotel in Texas or apartments outside Nashville. Owning that building yourself is a completely different transaction with a completely different legal effect.
What the deed actually gets you
Title to US real property. That is the entire list. American law contains no residency by investment property program of the kind a European golden visa brochure may have trained you to expect, and the immigrant visa preference categories are set out in 8 USC 1153, the statute allocating employment based visas. Real estate ownership appears nowhere in it.
A foreign owner can still be refused entry at the airport. Officers admit visitors for a fixed period of stay, and a paid off condo in Naples does not extend it by a single day.
Ownership can even work against you. Anyone applying for a B-2 visitor visa has to overcome the presumption of immigrant intent under section 214(b) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, and a consular officer is looking for ties that pull you home rather than ties that pull you to Florida.
Where property purchases fail the 10 job test
Job creation is the engine of the whole program. The EB-5 regulation at 8 CFR 204.6 requires 10 full time positions for qualifying US workers, and a personal residence produces none. Your gardener works for a landscaping company. So does the pool technician, and neither one is an employee of any enterprise you invested in.
Rental property is barely better.
Buy a six unit building in Phoenix and the honest count of full time W-2 positions it supports lands somewhere between zero and one. Even a 200 unit complex struggles. It might employ an on-site manager plus a leasing agent, and maybe two maintenance staff, which is four positions against a requirement of 10. No economist can paper over that gap when the Form I-829 petition to remove conditions falls due.
Job preservation is the narrow exception, and it reaches only a troubled business that has existed for at least two years and lost at least 20 percent of its net worth. Buying a stabilized apartment building is not that.
Passive ownership and the new commercial enterprise rule
EB-5 capital has to go into a new commercial enterprise, defined by regulation as a for profit entity formed for the ongoing conduct of lawful business. The same rule expressly excludes noncommercial activity such as owning and operating a personal residence. Someone who buys a lot in Cape Coral and waits for appreciation is conducting no business whatsoever.
A management requirement sits alongside it. The investor must be engaged in the enterprise through day to day management or through policy formation, and limited partners satisfy that test through the statutory rights their partnership agreement gives them. A landlord collecting rent on a duplex has no such structure to point at. Whether you clear these thresholds at all is worth checking against the broader EB-5 eligibility criteria before spending money on anything.
Can you count the construction workers on your own build?
Sometimes, and this is the one place where property development and EB-5 genuinely merge. An investor who forms a company to buy land and build on it can count construction jobs as direct jobs where the construction activity itself runs for at least two years. Petitions of that kind use Form I-526, the standalone immigrant petition for investors outside a regional center.
The catch is that you have become a developer. You now carry the entitlement risk, the construction risk and the leasing risk, with the immigration risk stacked on top of all three. Read the unvarnished version in our guide to direct EB-5 investment before choosing it over a passive subscription.
Treat the tax question separately from the visa question
Owning US property creates US tax exposure with or without status. Rent from a US building is US source income reportable on Form 1040-NR, the return filed by nonresident aliens. Selling later triggers FIRPTA withholding, generally 15 percent of the gross sale price, recoverable only once a return has been filed.
Time spent in the house matters as well. The IRS substantial presence test can make you a US tax resident on worldwide income long before any immigration officer would call you a resident of anything. Retirees who buy in Florida and then spend five months a year there fall into it regularly, which is one reason retirement planning around EB-5 begins with an accountant rather than a broker.
Carrying costs run on their own schedule. A $2,000,000 Florida house generates a property tax bill in the tens of thousands every year, and a non-homestead owner gets neither the homestead exemption nor the Save Our Homes assessment cap that protects Florida residents.
The regional center route finances real estate for you
Here is where most families land. A regional center pools capital from many investors and lends it to a developer. An economist then counts the direct, indirect and induced jobs generated by total project spending, and investors file Form I-526E, the regional center petition while taking no operational role at all. You finance real estate without owning or running any of it.
Expect poor financial returns. Preferred returns on regional center subscriptions typically run at a fraction of one percent a year, and principal comes back only when the project repays, which plenty of projects do late. Add the administration fee. Legal fees and government filing fees stack on top of that, so the real outlay sits well above the headline number, as our breakdown of the true cost of EB-5 sets out line by line. The green card is the return.
The EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act of 2022 reserves 20 percent of annual visas for rural projects and another 10 percent for high unemployment areas. Infrastructure takes 2 percent. Those reserved queues move faster than the unreserved 68 percent, which matters far more than yield for anyone born in a backlogged country.
Two deadlines bracket the decision. The regional center program is authorized through 30 September 2027, and a petition filed by 30 September 2026 is grandfathered so USCIS keeps adjudicating it even if the program lapses afterwards. Both minimums take their first inflation adjustment on 1 January 2027. Before subscribing to anything, confirm the center has filed Form I-956F for that exact project, and if you already live in the United States on another status, ask whether Form I-485 can go in concurrently.
Already own US property? Here is what changes
Selling it can fund the investment, and that is the one genuine link between the two decisions. Proceeds still need a documentary chain reaching back to how you earned the money that bought the property in the first place. The purchase contract and the closing statement are the easy part. What officers want is the earlier link, and source of funds review under the USCIS Policy Manual volume on immigrant investors is unforgiving about gaps.
Refinancing works too. Capital borrowed against assets you personally own qualifies under 8 CFR 204.6(e), provided you remain personally liable for the debt. A loan secured by the project's own assets does not qualify, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.
One last framing. Buy the house because you want the house. File the EB-5 because you want the status, and go in knowing the risks laid out in our honest assessment of EB-5 pros and cons. Folding both goals into a single decision is how people end up with an expensive property and no visa.