TEA Checker - EB5Investors.com
EB5 Investors

TEA Checker

The EB-5 TEA Finder app is a free and efficient tool for developers, service providers and investors to determine whether a particular address might qualify as a Targeted Employment Area (a “TEA”) under the guidelines of the EB-5 program.

With the new app, users may obtain an analysis, which includes automatically analyzing all possible combinations of adjacent census tracts, on a project’s address in seconds. This is a unique platform where you simply plug in the address you are interested in and you arrive at a result page, which includes whether the location you entered qualifies as a TEA. 

If it is eligible as a TEA, the top of the page will be highlighted in green, with a “Success!” message. To know exactly why it qualifies as a TEA, all you’ll have to do is click on the details button, which will tell you how the location qualifies as TEA on the basis of the latest data, including American Community Survey data. 

This app automatically selects the tracts that would optimize the TEA of your Eb-5 project and presents a table of the labor force in the area and the unemployment area of the tracts. While the app will automatically select an optimized tract combination, you may also select or unselect the list of adjacent tracts to see how different combinations impact the unemployment rate.

Besides analyzing calendar year data, the TEA app is also updated monthly to capture more recent unemployment data that reflects the impact of COVID-19. The app provides easy-to-read charts and graphs to help analyze how your project location is trending based on COVID-19. If the project location doesn’t qualify based on calendar year data, but does meet the TEA threshold based on more recent COVID data, you will receive an Uncertain! message. Areas that have been hit harder by COVID than the nation-as-a-whole will begin to have more TEAs emerge. These trends are easily observed in the app.

Although the app is focused on TEA trend analysis, one can also view a TEA map that shows the project’s address next to the suggested adjacent tracts that would best fit your TEA requirements.