American Lending Center Celebrates 15 Years of Growth

June 4, 2024

Delaney Sexton
Contributing Editor

American Lending Center Celebrates 15 Years of Growth

“We started with three employees in a small office in Long Beach,” Shen recalls at a celebration on Friday, May 31. “Today we have 60 employees on the payroll. When we started and got our first investor for $500,000, we were excited. Then we got a second (investor), and it was $1 million. One million! Today, we have $1.124 billion in assets under management.”

John Shen co-founded American Lending Center (ALC) in 2009 in Long Beach. ALC began growing almost immediately and moved its headquarters to the Airport Tower in Irvine in 2021. It has opened three overseas offices and a satellite office in the state of Washington. The Financial Times has listed ALC on its Fastest Growing Companies for the last three years, and ALC has been on the Inc 5000 for the last four years in a row.

“And we aren’t done yet!” Shen says.

ALC has successfully funded 95 projects across the United States through its EB-5 regional centers – more than any other EB-5 firm. These projects have directly generated 30,000 new jobs, thus improving the regions with both needed facilities and economic growth. These projects and the Paycheck Protection Program that ALC administered during the pandemic retained more than 120,000 jobs.

Shen told his employees that they should feel good about this social support of the communities served and the country at large. Add the number of EB-5 investors who helped in their quest to move to the United States and pursue the American Dream, and ALC can fairly say it is making a difference in people’s lives. ALC currently serves more than 1,000 investor clients.