MIAMI – July 8, 2010 – Finding traditional bank financing for a mixed-use project in Hollywood, Fla., was highly unlikely in the midst of today’s credit crunch.

That’s one reason developer Charles “Chip” Abele turned to an investor visa program as an alternative financing vehicle.

Abele and his partners in the Gold Coast Florida Regional Center are launching efforts to attract foreign nationals to invest in real estate projects, as a way to secure a green card.

“The capital markets have basically shriveled up and the banking industry has pulled back from real estate,” said Abele, chairman and chief executive of the Coral Gables, Fla.-based center. “We’ve got a lot of projects in the pipeline, and we decided we needed to get into the capital business ourselves.”

And Gold Coast is not alone. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has approved 10 regional centers in Florida alone.

Depending on the location of the project, the minimum investment is either $500,000 or $1 million. The visa applicants must also show that their investment generates 10 jobs.

While the EB-5 investor visa program was created by Congress in 1990 for new business development and job creation, industry experts say that during the past year it’s increasingly becoming a popular financing tool for the real estate industry.

“The program has been totally underutilized until recently,” said Ronald Fieldstone, a corporate tax attorney with Arnstein & Lehr in Miami, who has worked on eight EB-5 project approvals across the country, including Gold Coast.

“All of a sudden it’s become a cause celebre, and more people are trying to take advantage of the opportunity,” he said. “It’s a cheaper source of capital to undertake a project that would not otherwise be feasible in this economy.”

Gold Coast just launched plans to begin seeking investors, setting up marketing offices in Venezuela, Mexico, South Africa, Great Britain and China.

Copyright © 2010, The Miami Herald, Elaine Walker. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune News Service