Project flourishes with foreign flavor

A once stalled $34-million waterfront marina redevelopment project in Charlotte County has started to heat up.

And the project, run by onetime Naples condo developer Allen Heise, can thank both the recession and China for the increased interest.

The down market recently forced Heise to search deep for alternative financing for the Charlotte Harbor Regional Center project he had been working on with his family and other investors since 2004. The project includes a marina to be run under a fractional ownership model. (See Business Review, Nov. 29.)

Heise's solution was to enroll his project in the federal EB-5 Visa program, which is where China comes into play. The program, combined with another federal program, offers foreign nationals an opportunity to obtain a green card, and potential U.S. citizenship, if they invest $500,000 in an American project that creates at least 10 jobs.

Heise has spent the past three months between the Gulf Coast, China and New York to meet with potential investors and their immigration attorneys. The results have been a jolt: Heise has secured 15 investors at the full $500,000 apiece, for $7.5 million funding. A dozen investors are from China, Heise tells Coffee Talk, with two from India and one from Germany.

“We've been very lucky,” says Heise, “because of the unusual nature of our project.”

Heise hopes to seize on the project's momentum. He and his partners plan to launch a website, www.eb5guys.com, with the tagline “Yuan a Green Card” at an American Immigration Lawyers Association conference in Miami Feb. 17. He also plans to open an office in Beijing within a few weeks, to reach out faster to more investors.

Heise, despite the momentum, now has a new challenge: Competition, from other developers nationwide who want in on the EB-5 and similar programs. In fact, the Wall Street Journal, in a recent story on EB-5, reported the amount of applications to the program doubled over the last year.