Moving to the Gulf Coast of Florida - Part 3 - By: IC

Finding someone to help us get an immigrant visa and who understood the process for our country was not as easy as it sounds. Whilst the forums were good for general experiences and culture tips, it was a bit thin on the ground on recommendations of reputable immigration specialists. To be fair we are talking about a few years ago now and these types of forums were in their infancy. What people were really talking about at this time was what not to do as they’d had a bad experience and wanted to warn others!

So we started our search back in Florida. We figured that the best and biggest choice of specialists would reside in the area where their clients are moving. In our experience this was a wrong assumption. We found plenty of immigration lawyers advertising their services via credited affiliations. However once we contacted a number of them and we explained which country we were from, it became apparent that the majority of immigration specialists based in Florida deal with Hispanic immigration only. We were European so we found it very difficult to find anyone to take on our case in Florida. After being told “not interested” half a dozen times, we were fairly downhearted and decided to give up on this route.

We then had a lucky break via a friend of a friend who had a son living and working in Florida on a visa. They gave us a name and a contact number of a visa specialist who was from our home country and worked specifically with potential business investors in our situation. Also, the visa specialist resided and worked in the town we’d pinpointed as where we would like to move to if we secured a visa, so in effect would be ‘local’ to us.

After a couple of initial phone calls to the visa specialist, it became very apparent that there was so much we didn’t know and wanted to ask, it was going to be impossible to get everything we needed this way. We needed a face-to-face meeting. That meant going back to Florida in order to move to the next step and hire an expert to help us.

As a piece of advice to anyone thinking about investing in Florida, it’s absolutely imperative that you have a face to face meeting with someone you are thinking of hiring and paying rather large sums of money to. In a lot of instances, the visa specialist is also a business broker so they offer a complete package. This means they can formulate the E2 paperwork for submission of the US Embassy and put your application together. This is usually for a set fee and ranges anywhere from $3,000 per person upwards. The second part of the package is the purchase of a business, which you need prior to your visa application being submitted. You cannot apply for an E2 visa with the plan “If you grant me a visa, I’ll then go to Florida & buy a business once I get there”. All the parts of the business plan must be in place before you apply to show your commitment, that’s why a lot of visa specialists also sell businesses, as they cannot do the application without the purchase part of the deal. They sell established local businesses for a fee, much like a home. The seller, or current business owner pays the selling fee.

So, you’re potentially going to hand over to a person in excess of $100,000+ to complete the requirements for an E2 visa. You can see why it is important that you meet them in person to see if you feel comfortable with them and can work with them.

We made the trip as soon as we could; we were keen to keep the momentum going. We spent around an hour with the visa specialist discussing businesses they currently had on their books for sale, what they needed from us, how long they had been in the business, what they did before this type of business, their success rate. We asked one key question that proved pivotal in our application; do you have any references we can talk to? Other ex-pats we can talk to about how you perform? Any good visa specialist should be able to provide this and our contact was happy to oblige. They gave us the name of 3 families they had helped and contact details.

Armed with this information we contacted 2 out of the 3 to corroborate what the visa specialist had told us. We also questioned them about their time living in the US, cultural difficulties, business red tape. This step in our research was probably the most important part in the whole process so far and would serve us well over the first couple of years of starting out in Florida. During discussions with one of the families, they happened to mention another visa specialist who they had not used, but came highly recommended. They were based back in our home country, not far from where we lived! They had worked in the immigration industry for over 20 years and had an excellent success rate. It would be rather foolish to not compare visa specialists and services offered; so far we’d only found one person who could help us. Therefore we asked for the contact number of this new name. We would make contact as soon as we returned home to check them out.

On talking to this new contact there was a rather striking difference to the first visa immigration specialist we spoke to. They did not personally sell businesses; they just did the E2 application part for a set fee. They could put you in contact with other recommended business brokers (all based back in Florida!) and the rules still stood. You had to buy a business prior to submitting your application. But by being put in contact with a range of brokers, you had access to a wider selection of businesses, not just what the one business broker/immigration specialist had available. This seemed like a much more logical and better route. Therefore we decided to hire the services of this immigration specialist and then work with a separate business broker to give us much more flexibility in our choices.

One thing that everyone will experience when speaking to these specialists is a sense of time is money. Don’t expect long drawn out conversations; all contacts will be short, sharp, to the point, almost abrubt. Please do not take this personally! There is a set criteria and strict rules of play when applying for a visa and they cannot be bent or deviated from. If you cannot or do not wish to meet the criteria as prescribed, then you are wasting the visa expert’s time and they want to find out as quickly as possible whether you are a serious investor or day dreamer.

So, we’d found our expert. It actually took quite a long time to get this far. We’d traveled over 4,000 miles to find out our preferred expert worked less than 100 miles away. But again, the research was invaluable and more importantly, we’d met in person some people who were going through the process right now and living the dream. Their insights and advice would prove to be worth their weight in gold.

In the next installment we will tell you how we decided what sort of business to buy.

About the Author

IC endorses Keely Smith of Gulf Coast Real Estate who is a partner in Florida vacation homes to rent and Florida pages, visit us and discover why there is no other place like Florida!

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