Editorial by Greg Sheehan
Director of the EB-5 Investor Platform and USCIS Compliance | Former USCIS Adjudicator, Immigrant Investor Program Office
This is by far the most important question an investor can ask. It covers more than the project, the economics, or the immigration pathway. It comes down to the protection of your future.
Every investor considering EB-5 is making one of the biggest decisions of their life and the vast majority are doing so for the very first time. Those who come to us with prior EB-5 experience typically fall into two groups: the growing circle of current and past investors who refer others based on positive experience, and those who were burned elsewhere and are now looking for job creating certainty and developer advantages.
The latter group shares a common story. They signed up for products that lacked direct developer accountability. They missed Matter of Ho requirements. Some got blindsided by the complexities of Direct Investments, got caught between lower-tier broker/dealer strategies, or simply failed to evaluate the economic fundamentals, financing structure, principal track record, and country-specific regulatory risks of the project they chose. In many cases, a carefully hidden structural barrier prevented them from speaking directly with the actual developer. When things went wrong, the harm fell entirely on the investor.
This post takes a deep dive into the most important part of that evaluation: trust. Every regional center will present you with their vision and invite you to join it. With hundreds of thousands of dollars on the line, the marketing power is formidable. Take it with a grain of salt and look for factual support.
To frame my analysis, I’ll start with a legal citation that USCIS Adjudicators at the Immigrant Investor Program Office regularly apply when reviewing I-526E, I-829, and Regional Center filings. When a lawyer makes a sweeping assertion to cover a gap in the record — with no evidence to support it — the benefit request can fail. USCIS may issue a Request for Evidence or Notice of Intent to Deny citing this principle. It applies equally to the claims regional centers make to solicit your investment:
“The assertions of counsel do not constitute evidence.”
— Matter of Obaigbena, 19 I&N Dec. 533 (BIA 1988)
In other words: broad marketing claims need to be supported by verifiable evidence. Emotional triggers like “rural priority means a faster green card” or “we’ve never had a project fail” are a starting point for inquiry — not a finish line.
*Third party verification from Rohit Nayak, a Legacy Fund investor in our Portfolio style RISE investment is additional material for consideration.*
Areas of review
1) Evaluate the proximity of the Regional Center promoters to the outcome of the project.
An integrated regional center that fundraises exclusively for its own projects is fundamentally different from a broker/dealer model. Broker/dealers are outside the stadium selling tickets to the game. When the doors close, they move on to the next event. It’s a legitimate business, but it is not the same thing as being on the field leveraging market opportunities.
At Behring, our future is directly tied to the performance of our projects. We offer investors a position in our real estate platform for the long term, which means the entire partnership team stays together until the final whistle. That alignment matters enormously when evaluating who you trust with a multiyear, high-stakes investment that needs to produce jobs in order to achieve Permanent Resident Status in the United States.
2) Does the Regional Center have the ability to perform actual oversight in compliance with the EB-5 program?
Every regional center that applies for USCIS Designation must describe how it will oversee its projects. Typically this involves submitting bios of principals and broad operational narratives. That may seem reasonable on the surface — but what you may not know is whether those individuals have been involved with failed or fraudulent ventures in the past.
If you’re evaluating EB-5 for the first time, you wouldn’t necessarily know to look. And many of the most valuable resources — enforcement databases, internal correspondence, historical project failure data — are not in the public domain. That said, open-source tools are available to you: UCC filings, bankruptcy court records, SEC enforcement actions, and general public records searches can all surface meaningful information.
The EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act of 2022 (RIA) materially strengthened this framework. USCIS now conducts background checks on regional center managers, and individuals with fraud convictions or securities violations within the last ten years are barred from participation. Regional centers must also submit annual financial reports — verified by third-party fund administrators or audited financial statements — to both USCIS and investors. USCIS is now conducting in-person site visits and auditing each regional center at least once every five years.
These are important structural improvements. But they establish a floor — not a ceiling. Your own due diligence should go deeper.
3) Has the Regional Center ever had to walk away from a project as part of their oversight requirements?
This field of questioning doesn’t seem to appear on even the most diligent checklist but it should. You won’t think to specifically ask whether or not the broker/dealer ever sponsored a structure that they had to walk away from. You won’t think to check foreign language versions of a website where regulations are different, or look at SEC filings for the principals involved.
You can ask directly, but as noted above, assertions and marketing charts are not evidence. Even audited financial reports will fail to disclose very well known project failures. Productive follow-up steps include: calling the developer partners directly and bypassing the broker/dealer, consulting several EB-5 immigration attorneys about the regional center’s reputation for transparency, or submitting written questions with a courtesy copy to the relevant SEC and USCIS enforcement branches. The power of federal oversight is available to you as an investor but most people simply don’t think to use it.
Investors who have come to us after difficult experiences elsewhere consistently report the same pattern: they thought they knew what questions to ask, trusted the wrong people, and didn’t know what to look for or where to find it.
4) As part of the oversight responsibility of the Regional Center, do the Principals have the specific tools and experience to take action in the event of economic surprises?
This is where vertical integration matters most. Our direct involvement in development gives us real-time visibility into project progress, market headwinds, construction timelines, and capital stack dynamics whether we’re dealing with supply-chain delays, interest rate volatility, or public-health disruptions. To use another metaphor, we are the war-trained pilot who can fly the plane in bad weather.
We have corrected issues before they became problems, and we have the capability to step in front of a foreclosure in the narrow window when that is necessary. A pure broker/dealer structure isn’t designed for that kind of intervention, especially when principals are simultaneously marketing the next project in a different jurisdiction.
When evaluating any regional center, ask specifically: what is their actual development experience? Have they negotiated EB-5 protections directly with institutional partners like blue-chip Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs), senior lenders, equity partners? Or do they simply take the deal that looks reasonably safe and hand off oversight to someone else? Do they have 60+ years of real estate development history across multiple economic cycles? The answers matter.
5) Are negative articles evidence of a bad project?
As in any competitive market, bold assertions without evidentiary support are common. Comparative analysis is legitimate and healthy and every prospective investor should ask their regional center about negative claims. That gives the regional center an opportunity to respond with evidence.
The standard applies in both directions: assertions are not evidence, positive or negative. You might hear about a bank failure, crime statistics in a broader metro area, or unrelated deals that fell through years ago. Even if all of those items share a geographic label with your project, none of them constitute evidence of anything relevant to your investment. As several of our investors have noted, speculation screams inferiority without accurate, germane evidence and that has brought many of the most knowledgeable investors directly to us.
6) How do investors leverage your data analysis to make a decision?
Supply and demand metrics like occupancy rates, rental rates, and absorption trends are the objective tools for evaluating local market health. We use them, banks use them, investors use them because they aggregate a wide range of underlying factors like employment base, per capita income, job growth, infrastructure, education, quality of life, climate, and demographic trajectory.
For the Oakland market specifically: housing need is well-documented, and the structural demand drivers are durable. The San Francisco Bay Area remains the center of gravity for the technology sector, AI, bioscience, and advanced manufacturing. As return-to-office policies expand, we continue to see employees who relocated during the pandemic being recalled to Bay Area offices. That long-term tailwind has stabilized this metropolitan statistical area.
1900 Broadway sits directly above the 19th Street BART station which is a fully underground stop with no above-grade infrastructure nearby. Residents have direct access to UC Berkeley, the Salesforce Tower, and Bay Area employment centers to the north, and to Silicon Valley and both international airports to the south. The immediate neighbors include PG&E (which recently acquired 910,000 square feet of office space seven minutes away) and Kaiser Permanente. Block (formerly Square) is across the street. Comparable buildings in the neighborhood that have completed their lease-up phase are operating near 95% occupancy.
7) What is the role of the partnerships in a financing model?
In large-scale project financing, your partners are evidence of institutional confidence. Here is a snapshot of key partners in our current portfolio:
- Bank OZK — Publicly traded (NYSE: OZK), market cap ~$5B, specializing in multifamily asset lending. Holds our senior loan. Institutional investors represent the substantial majority of the shareholder base.
- Essex Property Trust — Publicly traded REIT (NYSE: ESS), market cap ~$15B. Part of our General Partnership. Their completion guarantee and accountability to public shareholders adds a layer of investor confidence that a pure intermediary structure cannot replicate.
- Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL) — Publicly traded global real estate services firm (NYSE: JLL). Their property management arm serves as our leasing administrator.
- Riaz Capital — Multi-generational real estate developer focused on risk management, efficient delivery, and state-of-the-art development in areas of urgent housing need.
The presence of institutional equity partners with direct skin in the game is one of the strongest signals available in EB-5 due diligence. It means the people writing the largest checks in the capital stack have performed their own independent underwriting and made a commitment.
8) Customer service as evidence of trustworthiness.
This is harder to quantify but no less important. You are choosing a long-term partner. The quality of your initial interactions is a signal of future operational quality after the sales process.
When you speak with a regional center, are you talking to a subject matter expert or someone reading from a slide deck? How many investors have they personally worked with without using an agent-based model? Can you access testimonials from investors who have already been repaid? Can you speak directly with current investors?
At Behring, we maintain communications before, during, and after the process. Testimonials are readily available as well as a deep network of international professionals who can share their story directly with qualified investors. Our investor relations process is built around substantive responses on EB-5 policy, capital markets, SEC regulations, real estate development, fund administration, and compliance.
9) Subject matter expertise.
My own background is directly relevant here: I spent years as a USCIS Adjudicator at the Immigrant Investor Program Office, reviewing I-526E, I-829, and Regional Center filings. I was the Union shop steward there as well and frequently involved in meetings involving employment matters, policy, production metrics and process improvements. More importantly, while that institutional knowledge is helpful to investors who want to know about EB-5, the key is how we build our offerings, how we structure compliance, and how we assess what will and won’t hold up under scrutiny, and how to be careful about certain markets based on administrative concerns.
Our General Counsel, Peter Bibler, practiced law and taught in China, and has been part of billions of dollars in EB-5 financing. Many of his project petitions came across my desk at the Immigrant Investor Program Office. He subsequently developed deep consulting relationships across Asian EB-5 markets, giving us insight into cross-border regulatory dynamics that most domestic regional centers simply do not have. Many regional center principals bring legal or finance backgrounds without direct development or international experience and that gap can matter. Peter is a concrete example of why.
Our CEO, Colin Behring, comes from a family with 60 years of real estate development history. While working in China, he was regularly approached by foreign investors asking about EB-5. He saw enough problematic offerings that he decided to build his own regional center, one built on direct development experience and genuine accountability. He was awarded Developer of the Year by the San Francisco Business Times in 2025 and is funneling the local economic changes into a future-facing real estate campus that will be a driving trend in Oakland for generations to come.
10) Is the Behring-USCIS relationship strong?
Public record searches are the right tool here. You can read the text of our favorable decisions and see the precedents they established.
The USCIS website references regional center requirements that emerged from the Behring Settlement which is litigation I observed firsthand during my time at the Immigrant Investor Program Office. When USCIS asked all regional centers to re-file their designation to conform with the Reform and Integrity Act, Behring challenged that policy in court, understanding it could take years to resolve, and the outcome was favorable to the industry as a whole. We have also litigated successfully to protect investors against the $900,000 minimum investment threshold when it was forced into rule in 2019, and we secured a fundamental legal dictation ensuring that in the event of a future program lapse, regional center adjudications must continue.
Beyond litigation: to date, our completed projects have achieved a 100% rate on I-956F project approvals, I-526E approvals, and I-829 approvals. This reflects investors who completed the program and it does not include those who chose not to pursue EB-5 for personal reasons unrelated to the program, such as other visa approvals, marriage to a U.S. citizen, or decisions to remain in the investor’s country of origin.
In Conclusion
We encourage comparison and we welcome challenge questions. One last analogy to finish is that due diligence is like trying to take down a castle with everything you can muster. If it doesn’t break, you’ll feel safe inside. Subjective experience, collective examination, verifiable data, and understanding the process to ask the right questions are the keys.
At the end of the day, assertions made without evidentiary support are worthless. I learned that adjudicating petitions at the Immigrant Investor Program Office, and it’s the standard we hold ourselves to at Behring.
Ready to evaluate Behring against the market? Schedule a call with our team →
Schedule a Call with Behring’s Team of EB-5 Experts to Get Started Today
Schedule a call and learn about EB-5, our investment opportunities, processing time estimates, cost estimates, financing options, attorney recommendations, and more!
