Golden Visas Close, EB-5 Fills the Gap: What Practitioners Must Do Before January 2027

I had three calls last week from clients who had been planning to use Spain's golden visa, and all three asked me the same question: now what? Here is the truth I gave each of them. Europe is closing the door on property-for-residency just as EB-5, the U.S. investor visa program, sits at its lowest threshold in years before a scheduled increase on January 1, 2027. The September 30, 2026 deadline to lock in current EB-5 thresholds has already passed. That means every client walking into your office today is filing under rules that are about to change, and most of them don't know it.

The U.S. Policy Corridor: Market Conditions

Foreign buyers purchased 67,100 existing U.S. homes worth $45.3 billion between April 2025 and March 2026, according to NAR's 2026 International Transactions report. That is a 14% drop in transaction count and a 19.1% drop in dollar volume from the year before. I want practitioners to read that number carefully, because the prior year told a different story: 78,100 properties purchased, up 44% year-over-year, the first increase since 2017. We are now in a correction, not a collapse.

The buyer profile remains distinct from the domestic market. Foreign buyers paid a median price of $465,000, and 48% paid all cash, compared to roughly 28% of all U.S. buyers. That cash share matters enormously for EB-5 practitioners, because it tells you these buyers are not leverage-dependent. They are capital-rich and mobility-seeking. Canada and Mexico, the two bordering countries, now represent the largest share of foreign buyers, both gaining share. China's share fell to 11%, down from 15% a year earlier, even as China still generates outsized dollar volume per transaction.

Geographically, the corridor concentrates hard: Florida at 20%, California at 19%, Texas at 12%. For EB-5 regional center practitioners, this concentration is not incidental. It mirrors where regional center projects, commercial development, and investor-friendly real estate markets have clustered for over a decade. If you are advising a client on where to place EB-5 capital, these three states remain the gravitational center of the corridor, both for job creation compliance and for exit liquidity when the investor eventually wants to sell or redeploy.

One number should stop every agent working this space: only 381 of 4,970 surveyed Realtors reported handling even one international buyer. This is a specialist's market. The practitioners who understand visa-linked real estate are serving a small, high-value, high-complexity client base, and they are not interchangeable with a general residential agent.

Legal & Regulatory Framework

Start with the calendar, because in this corridor the calendar is the law. Under the EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act (RIA), the minimum investment is $1,050,000 for a standard new commercial enterprise, or $800,000 if the project sits in a Targeted Employment Area (TEA), a designation for rural or high-unemployment regions, or qualifies as infrastructure. These thresholds are scheduled to increase on January 1, 2027, adjusted for inflation. The Department of Homeland Security has not yet published the final figures. That uncertainty itself is a liability trap: clients who delay filing on the assumption that "nothing changes until the number is announced" may find themselves filing at a materially higher threshold with no warning window.

Here is the trap I see most often. An attorney tells a client, correctly, that the investment must create or preserve at least 10 full-time jobs for qualifying U.S. workers. What the attorney sometimes fails to explain is how the RIA's set-aside categories interact with visa backlogs. Twenty percent of visas are reserved for rural projects, 10% for high-unemployment areas, and 2% for infrastructure. As of mid-2026, these set-aside categories remain current for all countries, including China and India, while the unreserved category shows multi-year waits for those same countries. I have seen attorneys steer clients into unreserved-category projects purely because the sponsor's marketing materials were more polished, when the set-aside pathway would have cut years off the wait. That is malpractice exposure, not just a missed opportunity.

On the real estate side, FIRPTA (the U.S. tax withheld when a foreign owner sells property) still applies regardless of visa status. An EB-5 investor who also buys a personal residence, and later sells it, is subject to the same 15% withholding on the gross sales price under FIRPTA rules that any other foreign seller faces. Visa status does not exempt a client from tax withholding. I have had clients assume that because they hold a green card through EB-5, FIRPTA no longer applies. It still can, depending on their tax residency status at the time of sale. Confirm tax residency, not immigration status, before advising on withholding.

Entity structuring and beneficial ownership disclosure under the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA) also intersect with EB-5 real estate. If the new commercial enterprise is structured through an LLC or limited partnership, beneficial ownership reporting obligations apply, and foreign investors are often surprised to learn their identity will be disclosed to FinCEN, the U.S. financial-crimes agency, even where the underlying investment is passive.

The Practitioner Playbook

Here is what I tell every attorney and agent working this corridor right now.

• File before the DHS announces the 2027 numbers, not after. Clients wait for certainty. That is the wrong instinct here. The current thresholds, $800,000 TEA and $1,050,000 standard, are known today. Waiting to see the new number means waiting to file at a cost that can only go up.
• Match the client to the set-aside, not the sponsor's pitch deck. If your client's home country faces a backlog in the unreserved category, run the numbers on a rural or high-unemployment set-aside project first. The visa timeline difference can be measured in years, not months.
• Treat the golden visa refugee client differently from the first-time investor migrant. A family that already built a plan around Spain's now-closed €500,000 property route is coming to EB-5 with different expectations: speed, property tied to the investment, and a residency outcome they can explain to a spouse or adult children. Reset those expectations early. EB-5 is not a property purchase, it is a job-creation investment that happens to sometimes involve real estate development.
• Run the FIRPTA analysis at intake, not at closing. If the investor plans to also buy a personal residence, build the tax withholding conversation into the very first meeting. I have watched deals nearly die at the closing table because nobody explained 15% withholding until the wire was already scheduled.

The practitioners who win in this corridor are the ones who treat immigration law and real estate law as one practice area, not two referrals. The client does not experience them separately, and neither should your advice.

What the Data Tells Us About Buyer Motivation

The motivation behind this capital shift is not mysterious, but it is layered. For years, Spain's €500,000 property-linked golden visa was the default option for a certain profile of investor: capital-rich, risk-averse, not necessarily seeking to relocate immediately, but wanting an insurance policy. Spain issued close to 250,000 of these permits between 2014 and 2023. That is the scale of the pipeline now redirected elsewhere.

Spain's termination under Organic Law 1/2025, effective April 3, 2025, was explicitly framed as a housing affordability measure. Portugal closed its real estate route back in 2023 and, as of May 19, 2026, extended its path to citizenship from five years to ten, undercutting the program's remaining appeal even for the fund-investment route that stayed open. Greece kept its program alive but repriced it into a two-tier system, €800,000 in high-demand zones like Athens and the islands, €400,000 elsewhere, while banning short-term rentals on golden visa properties. The OECD has flagged these programs directly as risks for money laundering and housing price inflation, which tells you the political pressure is not going away.

What this means for EB-5 is straightforward: the investor who wanted a residency option backed by real property, without wanting to immediately relocate, now has fewer European options and a shrinking list of countries (Portugal, Greece, Italy, Malta, Cyprus) still accepting new applicants. The UAE and Thailand are absorbing some of this flow outside the EU entirely. But for a subset of this capital, particularly clients with existing U.S. ties, business interests, or children in U.S. education, EB-5 remains the more durable answer precisely because it leads to a green card and, eventually, citizenship, not a renewable residence permit vulnerable to the next legislative session.

The 48% all-cash rate among foreign buyers tells you this is not a financed, leverage-driven market. It is a capital preservation and mobility market. These buyers are not stretching for a mortgage. They are deploying liquid wealth toward a legal outcome: residency, eventually citizenship, and a real estate asset that holds value in a currency and legal system they trust more than their home jurisdiction.

What I'm Watching

Three signals will define this corridor over the next six to twelve months.

First, the DHS inflation adjustment itself. Once published, expect a wave of comparison shopping. If the new TEA threshold moves meaningfully above $800,000, practitioners should expect a short but intense rush of clients trying to finalize deals under contracts negotiated before the increase takes effect, even though the filing deadline for the old numbers has passed. Watch for sponsors marketing "grandfather" claims that do not hold up to scrutiny.

Second, further European retrenchment. Greece's two-tier repricing and Portugal's citizenship clock extension are not final moves, they are adjustments under continued domestic housing pressure. I expect at least one more European program, possibly Cyprus or Malta, to tighten terms again before mid-2027. Every closure pushes more capital toward the remaining open doors, EB-5 among them.

Third, the backlog math for China and India in the unreserved EB-5 category. The set-aside categories are current now, but that will not last if volume surges from redirected golden visa capital. Practitioners should model conservatively: assume today's set-aside speed is temporary, and advise clients accordingly on filing urgency rather than complacency.