The stages are petition, then conditional permanent residence for two years, with Form I-829 filed in the 90 days before the second anniversary to remove the conditions. Processing times vary and are published officially. The last stage is where the jobs, the sustained investment and the participation requirement are tested.
The two-year clock is the part that decides it
Hypothetical example: Hartley is a Callander contractor planning an EB-5 route to permanent residence. It is easy to treat approval of the initial petition as the finish line. In practice the sequence has a second half.
Conditional permanent residence lasts two years for the investor and each derivative, and before it expires the conditions must be removed by filing Form I-829 with evidence that the capital was invested and sustained, that the required jobs were created, and that the enterprise operated as described. That means the questions asked at the outset about how the project counts its ten positions and when they will exist are not academic; they are the questions the final filing answers. Hartley should also plan around residence itself, since permanent residence carries expectations about maintaining it that a contractor still running a Callander business needs to think through before the first stage is filed.
Published processing times move, so the useful habit is to check them officially at the moment a decision is taken rather than relying on a figure somebody was quoted a year earlier.