MARKET INTELLIGENCE & INDUSTRY NEWS

Cody Caudill and Jeffrey Doussan, Team Leader and Operating Principal of KW New Orleans, on local appreciation outpacing the nation, the K-shaped market tightening its grip, and the industry consolidation wave reshaping brokerages, mortgage companies, and MLSs all at once.

KW NEW ORLEANS LEADERSHIP BRIEFING · KW NEW ORLEANS · JUNE 2026

WHY IT MATTERS

A lot can shift in a month. Inflation surprised to the upside. The bond market began pricing in a potential rate increase. Compass is facing antitrust scrutiny over its acquisition of multiple national brands. And inside all of that noise, Orleans Parish home values quietly appreciated at 5.6% — outpacing the national forecast and tightening inventory to levels that are putting sellers back in the driver’s seat.

This is the monthly market briefing that Cody Caudill and Jeffrey Doussandeliver to the agents of KW New Orleans — equal parts economic dashboard, competitive intelligence, and practical street-level strategy. Below is what they covered, why it matters, and what it means for buyers, sellers, and agents working the New Orleans metro right now.

Cody Caudill & Jeffrey Doussan

TEAM LEADER & OPERATING PRINCIPAL — KW NEW ORLEANS

Cody Caudill came up through production before stepping into leadership — which means when he pulls market data, he reads it the way an agent does, not the way a press release does. Jeffrey Doussan has the habit of saying things in meetings that other brokerage leaders wait six months to post on LinkedIn. Together they run KW New Orleans, currently the top growth office among all national brands in the metro by total volume, year-to-date. Their monthly briefings cover everything from Orleans Parish absorption rates to Compass’s antitrust exposure to what a SpaceX IPO might do to the appetite for hard assets. The fact that they do this in front of their agents, on the record, says something about how they think the game should be played.

THE STATE OF PLAY

The macro picture heading into summer 2026 is complicated — strong jobs data, sticky inflation, and a bond market that has started whispering about rate increases rather than cuts. Here’s where things stand across the key indicators.

01. Inflation at 4.2%. The most recent reading came in above the prior month and well above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target. Energy costs are the sharpest driver. Caudill and Doussan flagged this as the administration’s most urgent problem — not just economically, but politically.

02. Bond market pricing in a rate increase. A stronger-than-expected jobs report on the Friday before this briefing sent an unexpected signal: rather than cuts, fixed income markets began pricing in the possibility of the Fed raising rates. That surprised even the KW New Orleans leadership team.

03. National home sales tracking near 4.2 million units annually. That figure is roughly a million units below the pre-pandemic pace of five-plus million. The inventory overhang from that gap hasn’t closed — but locally, the numbers tell a different story.

04. Orleans Parish appreciation at 5.6% rolling 12-month. Against a national forecast of around 4%, the parish is outperforming. Month supply has dropped sharply. Days on market have fallen dramatically. For agents who lived through the slowdown, this data is worth showing clients directly.

“Real estate protects you against inflation — it’s a hedge, not inflation-sensitive the way other assets are. Keep that in mind as we get into this data.” — JEFFREY DOUSSAN, OPERATING PRINCIPAL, KW NEW ORLEANS

THE K-SHAPE TIGHTENS

Caudill and Doussan have been tracking what they call the K-shaped marketfor over a year, and the latest data suggests the split is widening rather than closing. At the high end — particularly above $1 million in Orleans Parish — multiple offers, above-asking prices, and cash buyers dominate. Below that threshold, affordability headwinds and tight lending standards are squeezing activity.

The cash buyer concentration in New Orleans is genuinely unusual relative to national norms, and Doussan views it as both a structural advantage and a signal. When lending gets difficult, markets with heavy cash participation stay liquid longer. But the flip side is real: as Doussan put it, higher inflation will “exacerbate the K shape” — compressing purchasing power for buyers who need financing while doing little to slow demand at the top. One agent in the room noted that a client recently lost out in competition on two separate listings over $2 million and was making a third offer. For agents working that segment, Caudill flagged cash offer bridge programs — fee-based products that allow financed buyers to compete with all-cash terms — as a tool worth revisiting.

The underlying demand signal is harder to argue with. Month supply — the ratio of available homes to current sales pace — has dropped sharply in the local market. A balanced market sits near six months. The New Orleansmarket is well below that. Showing clients a rolling 12-month view of this data, rather than the volatile month-over-month swings that can make any market look chaotic, is the practical takeaway Caudill emphasized for agents sitting in the room.

INDUSTRY CONSOLIDATION: MERGERS, ACQUISITIONS, AND WHAT “SYNERGY” ACTUALLY MEANS

The brokerage and mortgage industries are both in the middle of consolidation cycles, and the KW leadership team spent significant time on what that actually looks like on the ground — for agents, for clients, and for competing firms.

On the mortgage side, Fidelity Bank recently sold off its NOLALendingdivision to a Florida-based acquirer, and key personnel including top producers have since departed. Doussan has been watching this play out for months. His read: mortgage companies that staffed up aggressively during the rate-driven volume boom of 2020–2022 are now too large for the current market, and consolidation is the mechanism for correcting that. His advice to agents is straightforward — identify the individual loan officer who has consistently served your clients well and protect that relationship, regardless of what company name is on their business card.

The same logic applies to the brokerage M&A wave. Compass’s acquisition of Anywhere Real Estate — which included the Coldwell Banker and Sotheby’s International Realty brands — is now facing antitrust scrutiny from the New York State Attorney General. Whether that deal structure ultimately survives legal challenge is an open question, but the business logic behind it illustrates a broader pattern: growth by acquisition, at scale, at a per-agent cost that can reach $20,000, requires aggressive cost-cutting to make the numbers work. Doussan translated that plainly — “synergy,” in corporate acquisition language, means closing offices and eliminating staff.

“Synergy is Latin for firing people and closing down offices.” — JEFFREY DOUSSAN, OPERATING PRINCIPAL, KW NEW ORLEANS

THE MLS WARS AND THE PRIVATE LISTING PROBLEM

Two separate but related battles over listing data and market access are playing out simultaneously, and both have direct implications for New Orleans agents and their clients.

Zillow filed suit against the Midwest Real Estate Data (MRED) — the Chicago-area MLS — and Compass, alleging the two conspired to pressure Zillow into displaying properties that had been marketed off-platform under Compass’s private listing strategy before hitting public search. A federal judge has already granted a temporary restraining order forcing MRED to restore Zillow’s access to roughly 43,000 Chicagoland listings while the case plays out. Caudill and Doussan were careful not to frame this as Zillow championing agent interests. Their read is more direct: Zillow is protecting its position as the dominant national property search destination, and any policy that allows listings to be marketed without flowing through its platform is a threat to that dominance. The lawsuit is a competitive move, not a consumer advocacy one.

Meanwhile, eXp Realty has begun feeding its listings into a Google Search pilot in select markets, surfacing eXp-affiliated properties directly in Google results. The mechanism matters: those listings route through HouseCanary‘s ComeHome portal, which partners with Google — not to Google directly. eXp started with “Coming Soon” listings in April and has since pushed its full active inventory into the pilot, which now spans eight major markets including Miami, New York, Chicago, Austin, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Caudill flagged this as something to watch. The same forces reshaping how buyers discover listings in New Orleans are now moving closer to the search layer itself — and agents who depend on third-party portals for discovery should pay attention to how quickly that can shift.

Locally, the question of who controls the NOMAR (New Orleans Metropolitan Association of Realtors) MLS and how decisions get made prompted candid commentary from multiple voices in the room. The structural concern: governance structures in many regional MLSs concentrate decision-making power in ways that insulate leadership from agent feedback, and the move to Flex MLS was cited as an example of a consequential technology decision made with minimal membership input.

“Our focus has been on what it’s been on growing your business, not on growing ours. Result, we grow, but we’re not leading with that.” — JEFFREY DOUSSAN, OPERATING PRINCIPAL, KW NEW ORLEANS

KW NEW ORLEANS PERFORMANCE: WHERE THE NUMBERS LAND

Year-to-date, KW New Orleans ranks as the top growth office among all national brands in the metro by total volume — a figure Caudill was quick to put in context rather than simply celebrate.

The office currently tracks with approximately 270 agents, though the number that surfaces in Matrix MLS data runs lower because a meaningful share of transactions don’t pass through the MLS at all. When Caudill adds back off-MLS volume, the gap to second place is closer than the raw data suggests — and he projected the office would pass McEnery Residentialfor the number-two spot in the metro within a few months.

Among the Keller Williams brand offices across the metro, the New Orleans market center is carrying the weight. Top individual producers are posting dramatic year-over-year gains — some exceeding 200% volume growth versus the same period last year. That kind of performance at the agent level is what drives total volume growth, and it’s a different story than headcount alone. For agents considering where to plant their flag in a consolidating market, that distinction matters. You can learn more about what building your business at KW New Orleans looks like or reach out directly to our leadership team.

COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE AND THE OPPORTUNITY IN THE DISTRESS

The national commercial real estate story — distressed office buildings, lease rollovers, regional bank exposure — hasn’t hit New Orleans with the same force it has in larger markets. But Caudill and Doussan see pockets of genuine opportunity, particularly for cash-positioned buyers.

Doussan noted that certain commercial assets in New Orleans can currently be acquired near or below their outstanding debt, a dynamic that rarely exists in healthy markets. The catch is financing: regional banks remain cautious on specific asset classes, and the equity required to close many of these deals puts them out of reach for leveraged buyers. For investors with liquidity, though, the window may be worth watching. The investment landscape in New Orleans has historically rewarded patience and cash positioning in ways that financed strategies cannot always replicate.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Orleans Parish is outperforming the national market on appreciation, absorption, and volume growth — at exactly the moment when inflation is squeezing purchasing power, the bond market is signaling possible rate increases, and every major industry player from Compass to Zillow to eXp is making aggressive moves to control listing data and agent relationships. Caudill and Doussan’s argument is that local fundamentals insulate New Orleans agents who stay close to their data and their clients — but the K-shape is tightening, cash is king above $1 million, and agents who don’t show clients the rolling 12-month picture instead of the monthly noise are leaving their best talking points on the table. The next few months will test whether the pending pipeline converts cleanly and whether mortgage market turmoil starts interrupting deals that should close. Watch month supply. Watch the jobs number. And watch what happens when SpaceX eventually goes public.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is New Orleans real estate outperforming the national market in 2026?

Yes. Orleans Parish home values appreciated 5.6% over the trailing 12 months, against a national forecast near 4%, while month supply and days on market both fell sharply.

What is the “K-shaped” New Orleans market?

Above $1 million, multiple offers, above-asking prices, and cash buyers dominate. Below that threshold, affordability pressure and tight lending standards are squeezing activity — and higher inflation is widening the split.

Why does cash matter so much in the New Orleans market?

New Orleans has unusually high cash-buyer participation relative to national norms. When lending tightens, markets with heavy cash activity stay liquid longer, which keeps the high end moving even as financed buyers face headwinds.

How is industry consolidation affecting buyers and sellers?

Brokerage and mortgage consolidation — from Compass’s acquisition of Anywhere Real Estate to Fidelity Bank’s sale of its NOLA Lending division — is reshuffling company names more than service. The practical takeaway from KW New Orleans: stay with the individual agent or loan officer who serves you well, regardless of the logo on the card.

About this series. KW New Orleans hosts regular conversations with the leaders shaping our city — developers, architects, investors, and operators building the New Orleans of tomorrow. These are the conversations that happen in the rooms most people don’t get invited into.

Disclaimer: This article is provided for general informational purposes only and reflects a summary of a public conversation. It is not legal advice, public safety guidance, or a guarantee of outcomes. Laws, policies, and crime trends can change, and individual situations vary. For questions about legal matters, consult a licensed attorney. For real estate questions, consult a licensed real estate broker, and verify any neighborhood-specific concerns through appropriate official sources.

This article was originally published on our website, which can be accessed here.

WELLNESS & CULTURE — AGENT MINDSET

Mark Berger, holistic life and health coach, on incremental change, cultivating real relationships, stress as an umbrella, and why New Orleansneeded its own yoga festival.

INTERVIEW BY JEFFREY DOUSSAN, OPERATING PRINCIPAL · KW NEW ORLEANS · JUNE 2026

WHY IT MATTERS

Real estate is one of the most demanding professions in the country — long hours, high stakes, and a culture that rewards output over everything else. What happens to the person running the business? That question sat at the center of this conversation, and the answer wasn’t a new supplement or a five-day cleanse.

Mark Berger, founder of Berger Health and creator of the NOLA Yoga Fest, came into the KW New Orleans studio to talk about something the industry rarely makes room for: the slow, unglamorous, profoundly effective work of taking care of yourself. His framework — built on incremental habits, conscious stress, and genuine spiritual practice — turns out to be just as applicable to building a real estate career as it is to building a healthier body.

Mark Berger

HOLISTIC LIFE & HEALTH COACH — BERGER HEALTH

Mark Berger was a lifelong athlete who graduated from LSU and parlayed a marketing degree into a job at Anheuser-Busch — where the job description was essentially: eat well, drink a lot of beer, and throw big parties. He did that enthusiastically, gained 20 to 30 pounds, and was coasting on a college lifestyle well into his early twenties. Then, during a recreational softball game at the LSU Rec complex, lightning struck his roommate, who died on the spot. That moment cracked something open. Berger didn’t overhaul his life overnight — he describes the shift as gradual, one small ripple at a time — but the direction changed completely. Today he leads retreats in India, holds a Lululemon ambassador background, wrote a book called Sadhana on building a daily spiritual routine, and founded the NOLA Yoga Fest, bringing the country’s top wellness teachers to New Orleans each Labor Day weekend. He is someone who has earned the right to talk about transformation because he lived the long way through it.

THE STATE OF PLAY

Berger’s philosophy is not built around dramatic overhauls. It’s built around the recognition that most people blow up their health goals precisely because they start too big. Here is the framework he laid out.

01. Incremental change over grand gestures. Berger’s book, Sadhana, is built on this premise: small, consistent actions compound into genuine transformation. Going big before you’re ready almost always ends in abandonment.

02. The morning sets the day. Berger starts each morning by smiling before he gets out of bed, then moves directly to at least 10 minutes of meditation, prayer, mantras, affirmations, and a gratitude practice. He is deliberate about not letting the day rush him before he has centered himself.

03. Conscious stress as preparation. Berger draws a distinction between the stress that hits you and the stress you intentionally put on yourself through movement, reading, and spiritual practice. Building tolerance for the second kind makes you more resilient when the first kind arrives.

04. Sustainability through simplicity. Almost everything in his framework costs nothing. Cook your own food. Go for a walk. Meditate for ten minutes. The goal is removing complexity, not adding it.

“The book is really about implementing incremental things into your life, so little small things that lead to bigger transformation.” — MARK BERGER, HOLISTIC LIFE & HEALTH COACH, BERGER HEALTH

THE SADHANA FRAMEWORK

The word sadhana comes from Sanskrit and means, roughly, your daily spiritual routine. Berger is careful not to make it dogmatic — he does not prescribe a specific religion or tradition. The premise is simpler: if you treat everything in your life as worthy of reverence, you make better choices across the board.

That includes what you eat, the relationships you keep, what you consume on television and social media, and how you move your body. In Berger’s framing, these are not separate categories. They are all part of the same spiritual plan. For people in high-output professions like real estate, where the lines between work and life dissolve quickly, that unified lens can be clarifying rather than overwhelming.

He also pushes back on the idea that self-focus is selfish. The argument is practical: if you are not taking care of yourself, you have less capacity for the people who depend on you — your clients, your family, your team. Putting your own wellbeing first is not indulgence; it’s infrastructure.

ON RELATIONSHIPS & RECIPROCITY

One of the more quietly pointed sections of the conversation dealt with relationships — specifically, how to stop waiting for other people to give you what you need and start actively creating the conditions for meaningful connection.

Berger describes a birthday party where he asked 30 guests to go around and share one thing they were grateful for and one thing they were actively working toward. Some people had never spoken like that in front of a group before. Some cried. Several came to him afterward and said it was something they had needed. His point: you can architect the quality of your relationships rather than inheriting their tone by default.

He is equally direct about one-sided relationships — the ones where, if you stopped calling, the calls would stop. His advice is not to silently resent them, but to either ask for what you need or gently redirect: suggest doing something that builds the relationship instead of something that drains it. Waiting for reciprocation without naming the need, he says, is a long wait.

“It’s up to us to cultivate the stuff that we want in relationships. If we’re expecting somebody else to come in and say, like, know what you need in your life, and you’re just gonna wait for that to happen, it’s never gonna happen.” — MARK BERGER, HOLISTIC LIFE & HEALTH COACH, BERGER HEALTH

NOLA YOGA FEST & HEALING THE CITY

New Orleans is, by its own proud admission, a city built around food, music, and celebration. Mark Berger loves that about it. He also noticed something missing: a dedicated, high-quality space for wellness, yoga, and holistic health that matched the scale and spirit of the city’s other festivals.

The NOLA Yoga Fest launched its first year with a local lineup, held at Republic and Aurora. Year two moves to Hotel Peter and Paul over Labor Day weekend, and Berger is bringing in approximately 12 nationally recognized teachers and practitioners — people who travel the country and the world to teach and perform. For anyone curious, the event website is nolayogafest.com.

The festival is not positioned as a counter-cultural alternative to everything New Orleans is known for. Berger drinks a cocktail occasionally. He eats at the city’s restaurants. His goal is to add a dimension to the city’s identity, not replace one. He wants people to arrive in New Orleans and know there is a world-class wellness event alongside everything else the city offers.

STRESS, THE UMBRELLA

The conversation closed on stress — and Berger made an important distinction. Stress is not only the thing that comes at you from the outside. It is also the thing you deliberately choose not to build tolerance for, and that absence shows up when you need resilience most.

His framework: everything negative in your life — weight, toxic relationships, unprocessed emotion, environmental noise — accumulates under the umbrella of stress. The physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual are not separate systems. Tension in one bleeds into all the others. The solution is not elimination of all discomfort, but the conscious practice of building capacity, so that when the hard things arrive, you are not starting from zero.

He closed with a Sanskrit word tattooed on his body: Swaha. It means, roughly, to let it go — to throw it in the fire, to release it to something greater than yourself. For a room full of real estate professionals carrying the weight of clients, markets, and commission cycles, it landed.

“If you just hold on to the things that are stressful in your life, it’s going to be really, really hard to keep moving forward.” — MARK BERGER, HOLISTIC LIFE & HEALTH COACH, BERGER HEALTH

THE BOTTOM LINE

Mark Berger did not come in with a 90-day plan or a supplement stack. He came in with something harder: the argument that sustainable high performance — in real estate or anywhere else — starts with a smile before your feet hit the floor, builds through relationships you actively shape rather than passively inherit, and holds together only if you learn to release what you cannot control. Start with one ripple. Let it become a wave. And if you want to see what that looks like at scale in New Orleans, show up to Hotel Peter and Paul on Labor Day weekend.

About this series. KW New Orleans hosts regular conversations with the leaders shaping our city — developers, architects, investors, and operators building the New Orleans of tomorrow. These are the conversations that happen in the rooms most people don’t get invited into.

Disclaimer: This article is provided for general informational purposes only and reflects a summary of a public conversation. It is not legal advice, public safety guidance, or a guarantee of outcomes. Laws, policies, and crime trends can change, and individual situations vary. For questions about legal matters, consult a licensed attorney. For real estate questions, consult a licensed real estate broker, and verify any neighborhood-specific concerns through appropriate official sources.

This article was originally published on our website, which can be accessed here.

LEADERSHIP & ECONOMY — EDUCATION, AI & ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Bobby Savoie, Dean of the College of Business at Loyola University New Orleans, on building companies from nothing, why AI will fire the people who misuse it, and whether New Orleans is finally on the right trajectory.

INTERVIEW BY JEFFREY DOUSSAN, OPERATING PRINCIPAL · KW NEW ORLEANS · MAY 2026

WHY IT MATTERS

The question of who shapes the next generation of New Orleans business leaders doesn’t get asked often enough. The answer, right now, involves a sugarcane farmer’s son who helped design a rocket, turned around a university budget crisis, and walked into retirement only to take on one of the most consequential jobs in local higher education.

Bobby Savoie sat down with KW New Orleans Operating Principal Jeffrey Doussan for a wide-ranging conversation that moved from federal contracting and employee ownership to AI literacy, critical thinking, and the long arc of Louisiana’s economic potential. What emerged was a masterclass in staying the course — and knowing exactly when to change course.

Bobby Savoie

DEAN, COLLEGE OF BUSINESS — LOYOLA UNIVERSITY NEW ORLEANS

He grew up in Belle Rose, Louisiana, where his family farmed sugarcane for 150 years. Enough 12-hour days on the back of a tractor convinced him to pursue engineering instead — first at LSU, then a doctorate, then a consulting practice that was never supposed to become a company. It became four of them. Starting in commercial nuclear in 1986, Savoie built and sold three firms before his final exit through Geocent in 2021, with a fourth exit following when the acquiring company was sold on Mardi Gras day. Along the way, his teams won contracts with the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Department of Homeland Security, and NASA — including work on what would become the Artemis rocket. He was present for the Artemis One night launch. When retirement came, Loyola called while he was in Greece celebrating. He said no. Then he said yes. The man who learned to build networks before he ever needed them now teaches the next generation that AI is not a shortcut — it’s a tool that will expose the people who treat it like one.

THE STATE OF PLAY

Savoie’s vantage point is unusual: he sits at the intersection of entrepreneurship, higher education, and a city in the middle of a slow but real reinvention. Here’s where things stand across the dimensions he knows best.

1. Loyola University New Orleans has reversed its financial trajectory. Enrollment is up, revenue is significantly higher, and a new dormitory is among roughly $60 million in campus improvements completed in recent years — funded creatively enough that it has helped rather than strained the operating budget.

2. New Orleans Entrepreneur Week moved to Loyola’s campus, drawing 1,400 attendees over a two-day summit period in its first year under the College of Business’s production. The event has measurably raised the college’s public profile.

3. AI integration is now mandatory for incoming business students. Loyola’s College of Business introduced a required freshman course — an introduction to AI in business — covering prompt engineering alongside the critical thinking skills needed to verify and apply what AI produces.

4. Regional consolidation remains the unfinished business of Louisiana’s economy. In Savoie’s view, the failure to build a unified Baton Rouge–New Orleans super-region has cost the state opportunities that rail infrastructure and coordinated economic development could still unlock.

“For the same effort I can get a $5,000 contract with the City of New Orleans, or a $50,000 contract with the State of Louisiana, or a $50 million contract with the federal government. It’s just a matter of knowing how to do it.” — BOBBY SAVOIE, DEAN OF THE COLLEGE OF BUSINESS, LOYOLA UNIVERSITY NEW ORLEANS

BUILT ONE CONTRACT AT A TIME

Savoie’s first federal contract — a $25,000 purchase order from the U.S. Department of Energy — took two years to win and likely cost his firm four times that in effort to deliver. That single relationship eventually produced $70 million in work with the same customer. The lesson he draws isn’t about federal contracting specifically. It’s about what patience in a single lane actually builds.

The parallel to real estate is direct. Any agent who has fought to land a listing, managed a transaction through a dozen near-collapses, finally reached the closing table, and then looked up to find a completely empty pipeline knows exactly the dynamic Savoie is describing. His answer to it — earned over years of sacrifice and employee ownership across four companies — was to shorten, then close, that feast-or-famine window by growing more than one relationship at a time. Not by abandoning what was working for something that looked easier.

Employee ownership was central to how he kept the people who made that growth possible. Across all four exits, employees shared in more than $100 million from company sales — a figure Savoie attributes directly to the decision to treat staff with the same intentionality as customers. Many of those employees followed him from one company to the next, bringing client relationships with them.

THE AI CONVERSATION NOBODY IS HAVING

The debate in most institutions frames AI as a cheating problem. Savoie frames it as a firing problem — specifically, the risk that the students who use AI to avoid learning will one day be replaced by the colleagues who used AI to learn faster.

He isn’t dismissing the cheating concern. He personally proctored an economics exam, phones collected at the front of the room. But his larger argument is that an institution which only polices AI misses the mandate: preparing students to apply it effectively in professional environments where their employers will expect exactly that. The College of Business now requires freshman-year AI instruction, and several professors who described themselves as AI agnostics have since redesigned their syllabi around it.

The cautionary example he offers is not hypothetical. Attorneys representing a nonprofit Savoie is involved with submitted a federal court brief generated entirely by AI — without reading it. The brief cited case law that did not exist. The opposing counsel flagged it. The attorneys were sanctioned, the nonprofit lost the case, and litigation against the attorneys followed. The failure was not AI’s. It was the decision to outsource judgment to a tool that, by Savoie’s own accounting, produces errors a meaningful portion of the time.

“The people who learn how… you’re going to get hired, and then you’re going to end up getting fired by the person who used AI to learn how to do your job better using AI through it. They don’t need you anymore, and you’re not going to be the one that’s kept around.” — BOBBY SAVOIE, DEAN OF THE COLLEGE OF BUSINESS, LOYOLA UNIVERSITY NEW ORLEANS

CRITICAL THINKING IS NOT JUST A STUDENT PROBLEM

When Jeffrey Doussan pressed on whether adults are doing enough to maintain their own critical thinking skills — not just students — Savoie’s answer was disarmingly simple: the process is the same regardless of the stakes. Evaluating a house, structuring a pitch, diagnosing a customer relationship, designing a component for a space launch system — all of it runs on the same underlying skill.

The prescription for keeping that skill sharp, in his view, is sustained engagement with hard problems. His engineering background gave him decades of practice working through situations where the full shape of the problem wasn’t visible yet. The habit of working toward a solution before you have complete information — then stress-testing what you’ve produced — is what makes AI a multiplier rather than a replacement. The tool accelerates the middle of the research process. It doesn’t substitute for knowing what question to ask or whether the answer makes sense.

LOUISIANA’S TRAJECTORY

Savoie is an optimist about New Orleans and Louisiana — but a specific kind of optimist, the kind who can name what has gone wrong and still believe the arc bends forward.

His diagnosis of the region’s stagnation is structural: the Baton Rouge–New Orleans corridor has never cohered into the economic super-region it could be. He points to how rail investment along the Washington, D.C. Beltway transformed undeveloped land into dense employment centers as the kind of catalytic infrastructure Louisiana passed on. The missed light rail connection between the two cities — a project offered at the federal level and declined over operating cost concerns — is, in his view, the kind of decision that compounds quietly over decades.

What gives him confidence is the entrepreneurial ecosystem that has taken shape despite those structural gaps. Organizations like GNO Inc. have built the connective tissue between sectors and stakeholders that used to be missing. The profile events like New Orleans Entrepreneur Week now draw suggest that the city’s identity as a place to build something is genuinely strengthening. He is careful to note he could be wrong. But the trajectory, in his read, is positive.

“I think the ecosystem we’ve built for entrepreneurship and for other companies to come in and build good things, I think we have a great ecosystem, and so I think it’s going to be positive.” — BOBBY SAVOIE, DEAN OF THE COLLEGE OF BUSINESS, LOYOLA UNIVERSITY NEW ORLEANS

THE BOTTOM LINE

Bobby Savoie built four companies, helped design a rocket, turned around a $20 million university budget deficit, and walked into what was supposed to be retirement. His through-line is not ambition — it’s obligation: to employees, to customers, to students who don’t yet know what they don’t know about AI. The College of Business at Loyola is now the institution producing the next wave of New Orleansentrepreneurs, and Savoie is reshaping it around a single conviction: the people who learn to use AI as a thinking tool will absorb the jobs of the people who use it as a shortcut. For anyone building a business or a career in this city, that is the competitive reality to plan around — and the next decade, he argues, will reward those who build networks and stay in their lane long enough to see the compounding begin.

About this series. KW New Orleans hosts regular conversations with the leaders shaping our city — developers, architects, investors, and operators building the New Orleans of tomorrow. These are the conversations that happen in the rooms most people don’t get invited into.

Disclaimer: This article is provided for general informational purposes only and reflects a summary of a public conversation. It is not legal advice, public safety guidance, or a guarantee of outcomes. Laws, policies, and crime trends can change, and individual situations vary. For questions about legal matters, consult a licensed attorney. For real estate questions, consult a licensed real estate broker, and verify any neighborhood-specific concerns through appropriate official sources.

This article was originally published on our website, which can be accessed here.

AGENT EDUCATION · VIDEO & CONTENT

Samantha Morse, Content Specialist at KW New Orleans, on why the camera in your pocket already beats most professional gear — and the handful of settings that separate amateur footage from content that builds trust.

INTERVIEW BY JEFFREY DOUSSAN, OPERATING PRINCIPAL · KW NEW ORLEANS · MAY 2026

WHY IT MATTERS

Every agent knows they should be posting video. Most don’t, because they think they need equipment they can’t afford or skills they haven’t learned. That assumption is wrong — and it’s costing them deals.

Samantha Morse came to real estate content from a background in film production, which gives her a perspective most marketing coaches don’t have: she’s worked on sets where getting it wrong is expensive, so she knows exactly which professional rules translate to a phone camera and which ones don’t. What she taught the KW New Orleans team in this session is a masterclass in doing more with less — and doing it right the first time.

Samantha Morse

CONTENT SPECIALIST — KW NEW ORLEANS

Samantha didn’t start her career in real estate — she started on film sets, where the standing rule is that mistakes live forever in the final cut. That background shaped everything about how she approaches content creation: obsessive about what you can control in camera, ruthless about not leaving problems for post-production. When she joined KW New Orleans, she brought that discipline into an industry that often treats video as an afterthought. She’s the person in the room who will tell you that your $100 gimbal is less useful than bending your knees — and she’ll be right.

THE STATE OF PLAY

Most agents overcomplicate video. The settings that make the biggest difference are already inside your phone — they just need to be unlocked and understood before you hit record.

01. Frame rate. Shoot in 24 or 30 frames per second. Shooting at 60fps wastes storage unless you’re capturing slow-motion footage. Your phone likely defaults correctly, but it’s worth checking in your camera settings to confirm.

02. Resolution. Shoot in 4K if your device supports it. The minimum acceptable resolution for professional-looking content is 1080p, which is standard on most modern smartphones.

03. HDR mode. Leave it off unless you’re prepared to do serious color editing afterward. HDR captures more data than the phone can process intelligently on its own, and unedited HDR footage often looks worse than standard.

04. Exposure lock. Tap your subject on screen, pull the sun icon down slightly to bring exposure down, then long-press to lock those settings. Without this, your phone will auto-adjust mid-clip — often ruining the shot by exposing for a bright window instead of the room.

“You could have a cinema camera and still do a bad job. You can have a camcorder from the 80s and make something award-winning.” — SAMANTHA MORSE, CONTENT SPECIALIST, KW NEW ORLEANS

LIGHT IS THE JOB

Lighting is the single variable that separates footage that looks professional from footage that looks like it was shot in a hurry. And unlike resolution or frame rate, you can’t fix bad lighting after the fact.

The core rule: always err toward slightly underexposed rather than overexposed. If a portion of the frame blows out to pure white, that data is gone from the file permanently. There’s no recovering it in editing. Dark footage, on the other hand, can often be brightened in post. On an iPhone, tapping the screen brings up the exposure slider — pull the sun icon down just a few percent before locking your settings. That single habit will immediately upgrade the quality of everything you shoot indoors.

For real estate specifically, natural light is always the most flattering. Open windows, switch on soft lamps, and avoid harsh overhead fixtures. If a space looks good to your eye when you walk in, it will look good on camera. If it doesn’t, no camera setting will save it.

LENS SELECTION & THE WIDE-ANGLE TRAP

Modern smartphones have three lenses on the back, each covering a different focal length. Knowing which one to use — and which one to avoid — makes a direct difference in how your listings look on screen.

For interior real estate shots, shoot on the standard 1x lens: the one your phone opens to automatically. The ultra-wide 0.5x option might feel appealing because it shows more of a room, but it actively distorts space — making rooms appear smaller and colder, and warping the proportions of anyone in the frame. For detail shots, the 2x lens is the right call. The guiding principle is simple: zoom with your feet, not the camera. Walking closer preserves image quality; pinching to digital zoom degrades it.

“If you take nothing else from today, take that.” — SAMANTHA MORSE, CONTENT SPECIALIST, KW NEW ORLEANS

MOVEMENT, FRAMING & THE RULE OF THIRDS

Once your settings are locked and your light is right, the craft of the shot comes down to composition and camera movement — two areas where film industry instincts translate directly to social media content.

The rule of thirds is the foundational composition principle: turn on your camera’s grid overlay and it divides the frame into nine equal sections. Place key elements — a horizon line, a person’s face — along those grid lines rather than dead center. For a room shot, align the floor with the bottom horizontal line. For a person, place their face at an intersection point. These are rules to internalize before you break them intentionally.

For movement, Morse offers a principle that reframes how most agents think about shooting: if your subject is still, you move; if your subject is moving, you stay still. For real estate, where almost everything in frame is stationary, that means the camera operator is responsible for creating visual interest through deliberate, slow movement — heel-to-toe walking with elbows tucked into the body for stabilization, or a simple weight-shift side to side for social clips. The goal is constant, subtle motion that keeps a social media audience engaged without a gimbal or any additional equipment.

One often-overlooked detail: clean your lens before every shoot. A phone that lives in a pocket picks up oil from calls and daily handling, and a smudged lens softens the entire image in a way no setting can correct.

FIX IT IN PRE, NOT IN POST

The most expensive lesson in film production — and the one most directly applicable to real estate video — is that editing cannot rescue a bad shoot.

Morse’s background on professional sets gave her a hard rule: anything you can solve in camera, solve in camera. Removing a reflection, correcting blown-out exposure, stabilizing a shaky clip — these are all things that sound fixable in post-production but require significant technical skill and time to execute well. For an agent shooting a listing walk-through between appointments, that’s not a realistic option. The better habit is simply avoiding the problem: duck out of reflective surfaces, lock your exposure before rolling, and move slowly enough that stabilization isn’t an issue.

Audio follows the same logic. The iPhone’s built-in microphone is serviceable for most on-site recording — but it’s located at the bottom of the phone, so blocking it with your hand eliminates it entirely. For noisy outdoor environments, an external microphone with a windscreen is worth adding. For quiet interior shoots, a single AirPod used as a wireless mic can outperform clip-on external hardware for ease and audio quality.

“The actual saying is, fix it in pre. Anything you can fix in camera, do it, because editing is a nightmare.” — SAMANTHA MORSE, CONTENT SPECIALIST, KW NEW ORLEANS

FORMAT, ORIENTATION & THE CLOSING VIDEO OPPORTUNITY

There is no universal format for real estate video — and shooting in the wrong orientation for your intended platform is a mistake you cannot fix without cropping out content.

The rule is straightforward: decide where the video will live before you press record. YouTube and long-form content calls for landscape orientation. Instagram Reels and vertical social formats call for portrait. If you need both, shoot twice. Trying to reframe a landscape shot for a vertical feed means losing significant portions of the image on either side.

Jeffrey Doussan closed the session with a point worth taking seriously: closing videos are among the most underleveraged content opportunities in real estate. Every closed transaction is real, verifiable social proof — the kind of specific, local data that both prospective clients and AI-powered search tools increasingly use to evaluate who to trust and recommend. Flooding YouTube with consistent closing content is not just a marketing exercise; it’s a long-term credibility signal in an environment where demonstrated results matter more than polished branding.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Samantha Morse makes a case that is harder to dismiss than most video advice: the gap between amateur and professional real estate content has almost nothing to do with equipment and everything to do with four controllable variables — exposure, lens selection, camera movement, and light. Lock your exposure before rolling, shoot on the 1x lens, move slowly with your body rather than your thumb, and open every window in the room. Those four habits, applied consistently, produce content that reads as professional without a single additional dollar spent on gear. The next step is volume: closing videos posted to YouTubebuild the kind of specific, verifiable track record that earns trust from both human clients and the AI tools increasingly shaping how people find their next agent.

About this series. KW New Orleans hosts regular conversations with the leaders shaping our city — developers, architects, investors, and operators building the New Orleans of tomorrow. These are the conversations that happen in the rooms most people don’t get invited into.

Disclaimer: This article is provided for general informational purposes only and reflects a summary of a public conversation. It is not legal advice, public safety guidance, or a guarantee of outcomes. Laws, policies, and crime trends can change, and individual situations vary. For questions about legal matters, consult a licensed attorney. For real estate questions, consult a licensed real estate broker, and verify any neighborhood-specific concerns through appropriate official sources.

This article was originally published on our website, which can be accessed here.

COMPLIANCE & BROKERAGE PRACTICE

The KW New Orleans leadership team breaks down the LREC Q1 violation report — and what 50 bounced escrow checks reveal about who you should trust with your client’s deposit.

KW NEW ORLEANS LEADERSHIP TEAM · KW NEW ORLEANS · MAY 2026

WHY IT MATTERS

When the Louisiana Real Estate Commission newsletter lands in your inbox, most agents skim the president’s letter and move on. The violation summary buried at the back — the one listing what actually went wrong across the state last quarter — is where the real education lives.

The KW New Orleans leadership team — Cody Caudill, Jeffrey Doussan, and Nichole Donald — turned that violation report into a teaching moment during a recent team session, working through what each line item means for agents in the field and the clients depending on them.

Cody Caudill, Jeffrey Doussan & Nichole Donald

TEAM LEADER, OPERATING PRINCIPAL & COACH / CO-BROKER — KW NEW ORLEANS

This isn’t a panel assembled for a conference stage — it’s the leadership trio that runs the floor at KW New Orleansevery day. Nichole Donald, who serves as both coach and co-broker, sits on appeal panels for LREC complaints, which means she has seen the exact violations in this report from both sides of the table. That vantage point shapes how she teaches compliance: not as a checklist to survive, but as a set of decisions agents will face in real transactions — on insufficient-funds escrow checks, mandatory contract forms, and who actually has the right to direct where a deposit goes. The three of them have a habit of turning regulatory fine print into live role-play scenarios. That instinct is what produced this conversation.

THE STATE OF PLAY

The LREC Q1 violation report surfaced a cluster of compliance failures that reflect real pressure points in the current market. Each one has a direct consequence for working agents.

01. Insufficient funds / returned checks — 50 violations. The single most alarming line in the Q1 report: brokerages issued checks to clients, agents, or title that bounced. This isn’t one bad actor — it’s a pattern that points to undercapitalized brokerages holding escrow they couldn’t cover.

02. Failure to provide copy of rejected offer. Among the lowest-volume but highest-stakes violations. When no listing agreement exists and agency was never established, the obligation to present — or document rejection of — an offer becomes genuinely murky, as the team’s discussion illustrated.

03. Failure to use the mandatory purchase agreement. Louisiana requires agents to use the state-approved purchase agreement form. Substituting custom or out-of-state contracts is a direct violation, regardless of whether the transaction closes cleanly.

04. Failure to obtain written authorization from all property owners. If a property has multiple owners and only one signs the listing or contract, the agent is exposed — even if the non-signing owner is a family member or appears cooperative.

“It’s very important that you’re in business with a brokerage that is — I won’t say legitimate — but can afford and runs their financials in a way that you know it’s secure.” — NICHOLE DONALD, COACH & CO-BROKER, KW NEW ORLEANS

WHERE YOUR DEPOSIT GOES — AND WHY IT MATTERS

The conversation grew pointed when the team addressed a scenario that is reportedly happening right now: listing-side brokerages demanding that the buyer’s earnest money deposit be held at their office, with no alternative offered.

Under Louisiana law, the buyer — not the listing brokerage — has the right to direct where their deposit is held. A brokerage cannot unilaterally require that funds flow to their escrow account as a condition of the transaction. If a listing side pushes back, the team’s advice is clear: put your client’s preference in writing and, if necessary, reference the LREC for clarification.

The preferred alternative is a reputable title company. That preference isn’t just procedural — it’s financial protection. As the Q1 report demonstrates, some brokerages are holding deposits they cannot cover. A bounced check on an earnest money deposit mid-transaction can unravel a deal and expose both buyer and agent to real losses.

“You do not want it to go to that brokerage. You want it to go to a title company. And again, that’s another issue — you want to make sure you’re in business with a good title company.” — NICHOLE DONALD, COACH & CO-BROKER, KW NEW ORLEANS

THE AGENCY QUESTION NOBODY ASKS UNTIL IT’S TOO LATE

One exchange in the session cut to a question agents regularly sidestep: what are your obligations when agency was never formally established?

The scenario — an out-of-town seller, no signed listing agreement, and an offer arriving from a family member of the property’s occupant — surfaced an obligation agents often don’t think through in advance. Without an agency relationship in place, the duty to present a rejected offer (or document its rejection) is legally ambiguous. The LREC lists “failure to provide copy of rejected offer” as a violation category precisely because the obligation exists in most circumstances — and agents are penalized when they assume the absence of a listing agreement eliminates it entirely.

The team’s practical guidance: establish agency in writing before you engage with any offer, on any property. Paperwork created after the fact rarely holds up in a complaint proceeding.

“When we get this every quarter, take a look at it, because it’s eye opening.” — NICHOLE DONALD, COACH & CO-BROKER, KW NEW ORLEANS

READING THE LREC NEWSLETTER LIKE A PRO

The LREC publishes its violation summary quarterly inside its standard newsletter distribution — the same email most agents delete after reading the headline item. Nichole Donald’s position on appeal panels means she encounters these cases before they become statistics. Her instruction to the team is simple: read the violations section every time it comes out.

The value isn’t punitive awareness — it’s anticipation. The violations that repeat quarter after quarter are the ones that catch experienced agents off guard because they involve judgment calls, not ignorance. Knowing that “failure to obtain written authorization from all property owners” appeared in Q1 prompts a different checklist conversation the next time a listing has multiple owners on the deed.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Fifty returned escrow checks in a single quarter is not a market anomaly — it’s a structural warning. The KW New Orleans leadership team is telling agents to treat deposit placement as a financial due-diligence decision, not a default courtesy to the listing side. Verify that whichever party holds escrow — brokerage or title company — can actually cover it. Establish agency in writing before offers arrive. Use the mandatory purchase agreement. And read the LREC violation report every quarter: Nichole Donald sits on the appeal panels producing those numbers, and the patterns she’s watching now are the compliance gaps that will surface in your transactions next.

About this series. KW New Orleans hosts regular conversations with the leaders shaping our city — developers, architects, investors, and operators building the New Orleans of tomorrow. These are the conversations that happen in the rooms most people don’t get invited into.

Disclaimer: This article is provided for general informational purposes only and reflects a summary of a public conversation. It is not legal advice, public safety guidance, or a guarantee of outcomes. Laws, policies, and crime trends can change, and individual situations vary. For questions about legal matters, consult a licensed attorney. For real estate questions, consult a licensed real estate broker, and verify any neighborhood-specific concerns through appropriate official sources.

This article was originally published on our website, which can be accessed here.

LEADERSHIP & INNOVATION — AI, COMMUNICATION & REAL ESTATE

John Deveney, CEO of DEVENEY, on why AI is flooding every channel with content — and why the agents who double down on humanity are about to become the most valuable people in any transaction.

INTERVIEW BY JEFFREY DOUSSAN, OPERATING PRINCIPAL, KW NEW ORLEANS · KW NEW ORLEANS · MAY 2026

WHY IT MATTERS

Every industry is asking the same anxious question right now: what does AI leave for us? The honest answer, according to one of New Orleans’ most seasoned communications strategists, is that the question itself is backward. AI doesn’t eliminate the premium on human connection — it creates one.

John Deveney, CEO of DEVENEY, has spent decades managing crisis communications for publicly traded corporations and local institutions alike, helping rebuild Louisiana’s image after Hurricane Katrina, and training executives to command a room. He sat down with KW New OrleansOperating Principal Jeffrey Doussan to talk about what the AI disruption actually means — and why real estate professionals may be better positioned than almost anyone else to come out ahead.

John Deveney

CEO — DEVENEY

John Deveney built one of New Orleans’ most recognized communications firms, but his most consequential work came in the weeks after Hurricane Katrina, when he was brought in to help manage the state’s crisis communications — running simultaneous operations in both Baton Rougeand New Orleans and eventually persuading national networks like CNN to stop looping footage of rooftop rescues and start covering the city’s recovery. He later commissioned landmark research through Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO) that predicted, among other things, that video would become the dominant communications medium post-COVID — a forecast that landed with striking accuracy. More recently, he has reimagined his firm’s longstanding executive speaker training into a program called Executive Voice, built specifically for the AI era. He is a keynote speaker who tells conference rooms full of industry professionals that their world is being disrupted — and then hands them a map for what comes next. He goes out of his way to get a table at Galatoire’s not because the food is unrivaled, but because being in that room with people is the whole point.

THE STATE OF PLAY

The communications landscape has shifted faster in the past three years than in the previous three decades. Deveney laid out exactly which tools are being damaged — and which human qualities are quietly appreciating in value.

01. Earned media coverage has lost the credibility it once commanded. Placements in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and national magazines were once the gold standard for a communications campaign. That authority has eroded significantly as trust in traditional media has fractured.

02. Social media and AI-generated content are flooding every channel simultaneously. When bots, machines, and every professional with a laptop are all generating content around the clock, volume stops being a competitive advantage. The channel is too crowded for content alone to differentiate anyone.

03. AI-generated video and avatars are advancing rapidly but remain detectable — and unwanted. A 17-year-old shown a near-perfect AI avatar of his own uncle said flatly he would never watch it. Audiences are already developing intuitions about what is real, and they are rejecting the substitute.

04. Clarity, credibility, and emotional presence are becoming scarce — and therefore valuable. As every other signal gets noisier, the ability to communicate with precision and genuine human warmth is moving from a soft skill to a strategic asset.

“Success is not going to be the most content, the loudest voice. It’s really going to be who doesn’t communicate most, because everyone can generate and every machine can generate — it’s who can communicate most meaningfully.” — JOHN DEVENEY, CEO, DEVENEY

FROM MESSAGE TO MEANING

Deveney draws a sharp line between what AI can do and what it cannot. Generating a message is a mechanical act. Creating meaning is a human one — and that distinction is about to matter more than any content calendar.

He pointed to the Galatoire’s experience as a useful frame. By most objective measures, it is not the finest table in New Orleans. The floors are hard, the lights are up, the room is loud. And yet people love it, return to it, and recommend it — because being there, among other people, is the experience itself. A ghost-concept restaurant that texts you a locker combination delivers the same product and none of the point.

The same logic applies to every industry being reshuffled by automation. Deveney described his visceral frustration with AI phone systems — not because they are incompetent, but because the moment a human being is removed from a transaction, something real is lost. The clients who call KW New Orleans agents are not trying to access information. They are trying to trust someone with one of the most significant decisions of their lives.

WHY REAL ESTATE HOLDS THE ADVANTAGE

Deveney was direct: real estate is not in the crosshairs the way other industries are, because humanity was never optional in a home sale. It was always the main ingredient.

He contrasted real estate with restaurants moving toward ghost concepts, customer service moving toward automated phone trees, and content industries where AI can now generate an entire marketing campaign overnight. In each of those cases, the human element was added on top of a transaction that could theoretically happen without it. In real estate, the relationship is the transaction. You have walked through the house with your client. You know what they want before they do. You showed up with the right coffee order before a showing. That is not a feature that can be automated away — it is the product.

Doussan shared a moment that crystallized the point: a client flying in for a weekend visit, a colleague out of town, and a simple question sent the night before — what’s your coffee order? The coffees were waiting in a clean car at 9 a.m. It cost less than ten dollars. It punched well above its weight.

“People buy from other people… that humanity is the main ingredient of every sale that you do. You know every one of your clients, you’ve walked through the house with them a couple times… that’s what we want. Other industries are being more disruptive because the humanity — that’s going to be the premium.” — JOHN DEVENEY, CEO, DEVENEY

EXECUTIVE VOICE AND THE ART OF BEING HEARD

Deveney’s firm has been doing executive speaker training for years — it’s actually how he and Doussan first met. But the program has been rebuilt from the ground up into something called Executive Voice, designed specifically for a world where generating words is free and being believed is everything.

The program runs eight modules, covering how the room works, how the body communicates, how the voice carries authority, and ultimately how to construct and deliver a story that moves people. It is conducted in person — deliberately so. The format is flexible, built around the schedules of the cohort going through it. Deveney described the first class wrapping up with four three-hour sessions, a structure the participants themselves shaped.

The case for investing in this kind of training right now is counterintuitive but airtight. Public speaking has historically ranked as the top fear for most people — ahead of almost everything else. That fear has kept it underutilized as a business tool even as its practitioners consistently outperformed. Now, with AI leveling every other communication channel, the executive who can walk into a room and make people feel something has a durable advantage that no language model can replicate.

He made the point with a simple image: a parent making a baby laugh. You don’t issue an instruction. You giggle first. There is a shared nonverbal language between human beings that we are born reading — and that is precisely what AI cannot fake, and what audiences are already sniffing out when it tries.

AI AS TOOL, NOT THREAT

For all his emphasis on the limits of AI, Deveney is not arguing against using it. His firm uses it. His policy is simply that nothing leaves the building without a human author taking ownership of it.

He told a story about a client’s assistant who became convinced that the president of her organization was publishing AI-generated content. Her sole piece of evidence: the writing listed things in groups of three. Deveney — who wrote all of that content himself — was genuinely rattled, went back and ran it through an AI detection system, and confirmed it was well within human ranges. The episode stuck with him not because the accusation was serious, but because of what it revealed: the presumption that AI-generated equals bad. That presumption is spreading. It changes the calculus for anyone communicating professionally.

His framework is practical: treat AI the way you treat a photocopier. Nothing inherently wrong with it. You would not hand a client something straight off the machine without reading it first. You use it, you review it, you own the output. The tool does not replace the professional judgment — it just handles some of the labor. KW New Orleans’ own shift to an AI phone system follows the same logic: the agents get their time back, callers get connected faster, and the human relationship is preserved where it actually matters.

“AI is like your photocopy machine. There’s nothing inherently evil with using the photocopy machine… you’d want to take it off the machine, look at it, decide this is what’s good for the client, change what needs to be changed, and give it to them.” — JOHN DEVENEY, CEO, DEVENEY

POST-KATRINA LESSONS THAT STILL APPLY

Deveney’s work after Hurricane Katrina was, in many ways, the ultimate test of everything he now teaches. The challenge was not generating content — the national media was generating plenty. The challenge was changing the meaning of New Orleans in the minds of people watching from thousands of miles away.

Working from simultaneous crisis communications centers in Baton Rougeand New Orleans, his team used the tools available at the time — satellite trucks, local and national news coordination — to push recovery coverage into the national feed and eventually persuade outlets like CNN to retire the rooftop rescue footage that had been on loop for months. The mechanics of that work are largely obsolete now. The principle behind it — that meaning requires a deliberate human hand guiding the narrative — has never been more relevant.

THE BOTTOM LINE

John Deveney draws a line that most AI conversations miss: content is already a commodity, and the agents who treat volume as their strategy are competing on the wrong terrain. What appreciates in value as AI floods every channel is exactly what real estate has always been built on — presence, sincerity, credibility, and the kind of emotional intelligence that makes a client trust you with a decision that will shape the next chapter of their life. Deveney’s prescription is not to resist AI, but to stop letting it near the moments that matter. Use it for the labor. Show up, fully, for the relationship. The coffee in the car. The walk through the house. The closing you chose to attend. Those are not soft gestures — in the era he is describing, they are the differentiator.

About this series. KW New Orleans hosts regular conversations with the leaders shaping our city — developers, architects, investors, and operators building the New Orleans of tomorrow. These are the conversations that happen in the rooms most people don’t get invited into.

Disclaimer: This article is provided for general informational purposes only and reflects a summary of a public conversation. It is not legal advice, public safety guidance, or a guarantee of outcomes. Laws, policies, and crime trends can change, and individual situations vary. For questions about legal matters, consult a licensed attorney. For real estate questions, consult a licensed real estate broker, and verify any neighborhood-specific concerns through appropriate official sources.

This article was originally published on our website, which can be accessed here.

BROKERAGE CULTURE & AGENT RESOURCES

The leadership team at KW New Orleans on why lead ownership is the foundation of agent freedom — and how a new AI phone system turns ~15,000 annual calls into a direct line between clients and agents.

BY CODY CAUDILL, JEFFREY DOUSSAN & NICHOLE DONALD · KW NEW ORLEANS · APRIL 2026

WHY IT MATTERS

Most brokerages talk about supporting agents. Fewer are willing to say out loud that the brokerage itself should be invisible in the transaction — a conduit, not a gatekeeper. At KW New Orleans, that distinction is not marketing language. It is the operating model.

During a recent office-wide meeting, Team Leader Cody Caudill, Operating Principal Jeffrey Doussan, and Coach and Co-Broker Nichole Donald pulled back the curtain on two interconnected ideas that define how the brokerage thinks about its role: the principle of agent-owned leads, and a new AI-powered phone system called Riley designed to connect callers directly to the agent they want — without the brokerage sitting in the middle.

Cody Caudill, Jeffrey Doussan & Nichole Donald

TEAM LEADER / OPERATING PRINCIPAL / COACH AND CO-BROKER — KW NEW ORLEANS

KW New Orleans is a second-generation, family-run brokerage that has operated out of the same address since 1998 — a fact that turns out to matter more than anyone might expect. Google rewards longevity: a consistent address and phone number, cross-referenced against 136 affiliated agents over nearly three decades, means the office fields roughly 15,000 inbound calls a year and that number is growing. Caudill, Doussan, and Donald lead an 11-person support staff built around a single conviction: agents should own their brand, their data, and their leads. The brokerage’s job is to get out of the way — and hand the phone directly to you.

THE STATE OF PLAY

The conversation inside the office meeting was blunt about what separates KW New Orleans from brokerage models that position themselves as the portal between agent and client. Four dynamics frame the difference.

01. ~15,000 inbound calls per year. The office’s phone number has been the same since 1998. Search engines recognize the permanence and reward it with visibility. The call volume is not flat — it is growing.

02. Riley, the AI phone assistant. When a caller dials the main office line, the AI assistant answers, identifies which agent they are asking for, and instantly texts the caller that agent’s direct phone number and email. The agent simultaneously receives a heads-up text with the caller’s number so they can follow up within minutes.

03. The portal model vs. the direct model. Brokerages like Compassaggregate leads at the brand level and distribute them downward. KW New Orleans is explicitly designed to do the opposite: route demand directly to the agent, cutting the brokerage out of the handoff.

04. Entrepreneurial Freedom, Real Support. This is not a slogan applied after the fact. It is the architecture. Agents own their leads. The cap model makes business planning predictable. The support infrastructure — 11 staff members, Command CRM, transaction concierge, coaching — exists to buy agents’ time back, not to extract a toll on their client relationships.

“You’re our customer. We would not exist if you weren’t here. You’re listing your lead. We’re not trying to go get the client for you. We’re trying to get you to the client that wants you.” — JEFFREY DOUSSAN, OPERATING PRINCIPAL, KW NEW ORLEANS

WHY LEAD OWNERSHIP CHANGES EVERYTHING

The distinction between a lead that belongs to an agent and a lead that belongs to a brokerage sounds abstract until you think about what happens when an agent leaves. At a portal-model brokerage, the lead stays. At KW New Orleans, the lead goes with the agent — because it was always theirs.

Doussan raised the contrast directly during the meeting: third-party lead sources like Zillow and Realtor.comare expensive, and more importantly, buying leads from those platforms does not build a replicable business. It builds a dependency. The goal of the brokerage’s infrastructure — the AI phone system, the Command CRM, the 28-year-old search presence — is to generate demand for agents organically, then hand that demand off cleanly, without extracting a fee or inserting the brokerage brand into the relationship.

Caudill put it in terms of architecture: some brokerages want to be the portal. KW New Orleans is actively trying to cut itself out of the picture. The brokerage exists to serve agents. Agents exist to serve clients. Those two things should not get tangled.

HOW RILEY WORKS IN PRACTICE

The mechanics of the Riley AI phone system are straightforward, which is part of the point. Simplicity at the technology layer means speed at the human layer.

A caller dials the main office number. Riley answers, asks who they want to reach, and within seconds sends the caller a text containing that agent’s direct phone number and email address — pulled from the office roster. Simultaneously, the agent receives their own text alert: someone is looking for you, here is their number. If the agent does not receive a call within a few minutes, they have everything they need to reach out first.

Caller ID and social data deepen the picture over time. A caller who has interacted with an agent’s Facebookcontent, for example, may already be identifiable by name before they say a word. The system is designed to get sharper, not flatter. And the cost to agents: nothing. The office absorbs it as part of the support infrastructure.

“Leads that are calling for you. That’s our big thing, leads that are calling for you.” — JEFFREY DOUSSAN, OPERATING PRINCIPAL, KW NEW ORLEANS

THE BELIEF SYSTEM BEHIND THE TECHNOLOGY

Technology choices are belief statements. The decision to build a phone system that routes callers away from the brokerage and toward the agent is not a neutral infrastructure decision — it is a declaration about who the client belongs to.

At KW New Orleans, that declaration shows up in the values the office publishes: transparency in economics and expectations, growth through coaching and collaboration, and a culture that is explicitly no-drama. These are not aspirational posters. They are the filter through which staffing decisions, technology investments, and brokerage economics get made. The Entrepreneurial Freedom, Real Support framework means that the 11-person back-office team, the Transaction Concierge service, the ALCtrainings, and now Riley all exist for one purpose: to give agents more time with clients and less time managing the machinery around them.

The office’s goal of growing from 136 agents to 200 is built on the same logic. More agents affiliated with the same address and phone number means more search authority, which means more inbound calls, which means more leads routed directly to agents. The network effect compounds. The brokerage gets more useful the larger it grows — but only if it stays out of the way.

THE BOTTOM LINE

KW New Orleans is making a specific architectural bet: that a 28-year-old phone number, an AI assistant named Riley, and an explicit refusal to play portal will generate more durable agent businesses than any lead-purchase program on the market. Inbound calls are climbing toward 15,000 a year. The system now routes every one of them directly to the agent the caller wants — with a simultaneous heads-up so the agent can follow up before the caller’s attention moves on. The leads belong to the agent on day one, and they leave with the agent if they ever go. That is not a benefit. It is the entire model — and it is just getting started.

About this series. KW New Orleans hosts regular conversations with the leaders shaping our city — developers, architects, investors, and operators building the New Orleans of tomorrow. These are the conversations that happen in the rooms most people don’t get invited into.

Disclaimer: This article is provided for general informational purposes only and reflects a summary of a public conversation. It is not legal advice, public safety guidance, or a guarantee of outcomes. Laws, policies, and crime trends can change, and individual situations vary. For questions about legal matters, consult a licensed attorney. For real estate questions, consult a licensed real estate broker, and verify any neighborhood-specific concerns through appropriate official sources.

This article was originally published on our website, which can be accessed here.

MARKET INTELLIGENCE · APPRAISALS & CONTRACTS

Nichole Donald, Co-Broker at KW New Orleans, on the sweeping changes coming to the appraisal process — and why the 30-day contract you’ve been quoting buyers may no longer be a safe promise to make.

CONVERSATION WITH CODY CAUDILL, JEFFREY DOUSSAN & NICHOLE DONALD · KW NEW ORLEANS · APRIL 2026

WHY IT MATTERS

A quiet but significant overhaul is coming to the way homes get appraised in America — and most real estate professionals, including many at the industry association level, are only now beginning to understand its reach. The changes touch everything from how long an appraiser spends in a home, to which data fields appear in your MLS, to whether your standard contract timeline still holds water.

Nichole Donald, Co-Broker at KW New Orleans, attended an appraisal roundtable hosted by NOMARspecifically to get ahead of the changes — and brought back intelligence that every agent working deals in the Greater New Orleans market needs to hear before it hits.

Nichole Donald

CO-BROKER — KW NEW ORLEANS

Nichole Donald didn’t wait for a memo to land in her inbox. When word started circulating about changes in the appraisal world, she went straight to the source — showing up at a NOMAR appraisal roundtable to sit alongside appraisers and hear the details firsthand. That kind of proactive intelligence-gathering is a throughline in how she operates. As Co-Broker at KW New Orleans, she works at the intersection of contracts, compliance, and agent education, helping the brokerage stay ahead of the procedural shifts that can quietly derail transactions. She’s the person in the room who asks the question everyone else assumed someone else would ask.

THE STATE OF PLAY

The appraisal industry is undergoing its most significant structural change in decades. Driven by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the shift moves appraisers from a paper-based workflow to a mandatory digital platform — with a November 2, 2026 compliance deadline. For agents, the ripple effects reach directly into contract timelines and daily transaction management.

01. 100+ new data fields. Appraisers will be required to collect significantly more property data per inspection, including ceiling heights in individual rooms and condition ratings for each space — details that were previously optional or omitted entirely.

02. Paper to digital. The entire appraisal data collection system is moving to a new digital platform. The old paper-driven workflow will no longer be accepted by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac once the requirement takes effect.

03. Inspection time expanding dramatically. What currently takes 10 to 15 minutes in a home is expected to stretch to at least an hour under the new data collection requirements — a change with direct consequences for scheduling and contract timelines.

04. MLS transition overlap. New Orleans agents are facing this appraisal overhaul simultaneously with a planned fourth-quarter MLS migration. NOMAR is coordinating with appraisers to ensure the new MLS includes required data fields — such as ceiling height — to reduce duplication of effort across both systems.

“Most realtors, including Nomar, really didn’t know the extent of the changes that are happening in the appraisal world.” — NICHOLE DONALD, CO-BROKER, KW NEW ORLEANS

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR YOUR CONTRACTS

The practical impact agents will feel first is on closing timelines. The standard 30-day contract has long been a comfortable default in the New Orleans market — but with appraisers spending significantly more time per property and adapting to a new platform, that window is expected to stretch. Donald’s advice: stop quoting hard timelines to buyers and sellers until the market adjusts and actual data emerges.

The old habit of ordering an appraisal five days before closing is, simply put, no longer viable. Donald recommends treating appraisal ordering with the same urgency as the inspection period — ideally placing the order within a day of inspection completion. Lenders are expected to begin implementing the new system 30 to 45 days ahead of the November 2 deadline, meaning the transition is already underway for deals closing in the fall.

“The days of get order and appraisal five days before closing, or whatever, is not going to happen.” — NICHOLE DONALD, CO-BROKER, KW NEW ORLEANS

A HARDER LINE FOR LISTING AGENTS

Jeffrey Doussan took the operational implication one step further: this is a moment for listing agents to stop passively trusting that the buyer’s lender has ordered the appraisal. He argues that verification needs to become part of the standard listing agent workflow — not just a polite follow-up, but a documented confirmation directly from the lender.

His position is that a written confirmation — an email from the lender confirming the appraisal was ordered and the scheduled inspection date — should become a non-negotiable step. With appraisal delays now capable of adding two or more weeks to a transaction, listing agents who let this slide are absorbing risk on behalf of their sellers. The additional remarks section of the listing may be the right place to set expectations explicitly from the start.

“I need to know that you ordered the appraisal, and I need to hear it from the bank… I want an email from them saying, yes, the appraisal was ordered. They’re going out this date, like that. It’s done.” — JEFFREY DOUSSAN, OPERATING PRINCIPAL, KW NEW ORLEANS

WHAT DOESN’T CHANGE — AND WHAT MIGHT

One point of relief from the roundtable: the longstanding practice of listing agents meeting appraisers with comparable sales and property documentation remains acceptable and, if anything, will be more valuable than before. With appraisers carrying a heavier data burden, a well-prepared comp package from the listing side reduces friction and supports a faster conclusion.

What remains an open question is cost. Appraisal pricing is set individually by each appraiser, and while the roundtable discussion didn’t yield a firm answer, the logic is straightforward: more time in the property, more data to enter, and a new platform to learn will put upward pressure on fees. Agents should be prepared to have that conversation with clients before a number is quoted in a buyer consultation.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Nichole Donald went to a roundtable so her agents wouldn’t be caught flat-footed — and what she found was that most of the industry is still in the dark. The Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac appraisal overhaul, effective November 2, 2026, will expand in-home inspection time from minutes to roughly an hour, add more than 100 new required data fields, and push the entire system onto a new digital platform — all while New Orleans agents are simultaneously migrating to a new MLS. The move: order appraisals immediately after inspection, get written confirmation from lenders, and stop promising buyers a 30-day close until the market shows you what the new normal actually looks like.

About this series. KW New Orleans hosts regular conversations with the leaders shaping our city — developers, architects, investors, and operators building the New Orleans of tomorrow. These are the conversations that happen in the rooms most people don’t get invited into.

Disclaimer: This article is provided for general informational purposes only and reflects a summary of a public conversation. It is not legal advice, public safety guidance, or a guarantee of outcomes. Laws, policies, and crime trends can change, and individual situations vary. For questions about legal matters, consult a licensed attorney. For real estate questions, consult a licensed real estate broker, and verify any neighborhood-specific concerns through appropriate official sources.

This article was originally published on our website, which can be accessed here.

MARKET INTELLIGENCE · INDUSTRY DISRUPTION

Cody Caudill and Jeffrey Doussan unpack Zillow Preview, the Compass-Anywhere merger fallout, and why an open market — not exclusivity — wins for New Orleans sellers.

CONVERSATION WITH CODY CAUDILL, TEAM LEADER & JEFFREY DOUSSAN, OPERATING PRINCIPAL · KW NEW ORLEANS · APRIL 2026

WHY IT MATTERS

The listing wars that have reshaped national real estate just landed in New Orleans. In a single week in April 2026, Keller Williams announced a founding partnership in Zillow Preview — a new product that puts coming-soon and exclusive listings on Zillow’s platform for the first time — while the Compass–Anywhere merger closed and the broader debate over exclusive listings reached a genuine inflection point.

Cody Caudill, Team Leader, and Jeffrey Doussan, Operating Principal of KW New Orleans, addressed their agent community the morning after the news broke — walking through what it means, what it doesn’t mean, and why they believe the open market remains the right call for sellers in this city.

Cody Caudill & Jeffrey Doussan

TEAM LEADER & OPERATING PRINCIPAL — KW NEW ORLEANS

Cody Caudill came up through production before stepping into the Team Leader seat — which means when he pushes back on a strategy, it’s because he’s run the math as an agent, not just as an administrator. Jeffrey Doussan has spent years watching platforms like Zillow acquire adjacent tools — transaction management, showing software, CRM — and has been vocal about what that data accumulation means for independent agents. That skepticism makes his enthusiasm for Zillow Preview more than a talking point; it’s a considered reversal. Together, they run one of the most active offices in Louisiana, and their read on the Compass-Anywhere merger — and what it means for the coming-soon period as a legitimate marketing tool — shapes how the agents in their office go to listing presentations right now.

THE STATE OF PLAY

A wave of consolidation and platform competition has been building for months. Here is what actually happened — and why the sequence matters for every agent in New Orleans.

01. Zillow Preview launches with five named founding partners: Keller Williams, RE/MAX, HomeServices of America, United Real Estate, and Side. The product displays coming-soon and exclusive listings on Zillow’s platform — inventory Zillow has not historically shown because it wasn’t being syndicated there.

02. Compass acquired Anywhere Real Estate, closing the deal after the Hart-Scott-Rodino antitrust review period lapsed without regulatory intervention. The combined entity carries significant debt, which Caudill and Doussan argue creates structural pressure to close more deals in-house rather than prioritizing open-market exposure for sellers.

03. Compass-Redfin partnership is a voluntary strategic arrangement — not a regulatory mandate. Compass chose to surface some of its exclusive listings on Redfin (now owned by Rocket Companies), whose primary revenue engine is mortgage origination, not listing search.

04. Compass vs. Zillow lawsuit resolved in Zillow’s favor. Compass originally filed suit against Zillow in June 2025, alleging antitrust violations. Zillow won on the preliminary injunction. Compass then voluntarily dismissed the case in March 2026 after Zillow agreed to stop blocking listings that had been publicly marketed on Compass or Redfin sites — a concession Compass framed as a win, though the underlying lawsuit was Compass’s to lose.

We actually kind of weaponized Zillow in our favor. — JEFFREY DOUSSAN, OPERATING PRINCIPAL, KW NEW ORLEANS

WHAT ZILLOW PREVIEW ACTUALLY IS

Zillow Preview is a new product — not yet live as of this conversation — expected to launch within approximately one month. It allows participating agents to display coming-soon and exclusive listings on Zillow’s platform while still operating within local MLS rules. In the New Orleans market, that means GSREIN guidelines govern how and when a listing can be shown in the pre-active period.

For KW New Orleans agents, participation is entirely optional. What changes if you do participate: KW branding appears on every listing photo, the listing agent’s contact information is displayed directly, and clicking “Contact Listing Agent” routes the inquiry straight to the agent at no referral fee. A second button — “Schedule a Home Tour” — routes to Zillow’s flex agent network, which Caudill flags as something sellers’ agents should be aware of when explaining the product to clients.

There is also a 10% referral structure attached to certain lead scenarios, but Caudill is direct about tempering expectations: with an estimated 200 million unique monthly visitors to Zillow, the odds that any given lead has not already interacted with the platform before clicking your listing are low. Don’t build a business plan around that number.

COMING SOON AS A MARKETING PERIOD, NOT A WORKAROUND

The most actionable reframe Caudill and Doussan offer is this: the coming-soon window is not a consolation prize for sellers who aren’t ready. It is a legitimate, structured marketing period — one that now has real infrastructure behind it.

The traditional best-practice sequence — list Thursday evening, debut at the weekend open house — was designed to manufacture excitement and compress decision-making. Zillow Preview gives agents a new chapter before that chapter begins. During the coming-soon period, agents can test price reaction without accumulating days on market on Zillow’s display, and can choose whether to show price history. That optionality is meaningful in a market where pricing is genuinely difficult right now.

Doussan is direct that this matters more at higher price points, and KW New Orleans is building a dedicated class — tentatively titled something like “Best Practices for Marketing Your Million-Dollar Listing” — to be released in the coming weeks with prescriptive guidance for agents on how to sequence the coming-soon period for maximum effect.

This is just as important of a marketing period as the actual go live, and at a time where homes can sit on the market a little bit longer, because we have a very balanced market. You need more things to have to announce

— JEFFREY DOUSSAN, OPERATING PRINCIPAL, KW NEW ORLEANS

THE COMPASS QUESTION — AND WHY THIS MARKET IS DIFFERENT

Compass has invested heavily in pitching the exclusive listing model in listing presentations nationally. Caudill and Doussan acknowledge the pitch lands well in certain conversations — and they want their agents to have a sharper counter-argument, not just a dismissal.

Their position is rooted in market reality: New Orleans is currently a balanced market, not the frenzied seller’s market of 2021–2022. In that environment, exclusivity doesn’t serve most sellers. The office ran exclusive listings when it made sense and has essentially none right now, because the demand conditions don’t support it. Compass, meanwhile, is spending significant marketing dollars arguing for a model that may work as an edge case but doesn’t hold up as a general practice — and in doing so, is drawing attention to a conversation that ultimately favors the open-market position.

Doussan also points to the structural incentive problem: a merged Compass-Anywhere entity with a heavy debt load has financial reasons to favor double-ended deals, regardless of whether that maximizes seller proceeds. That’s not a scandal — it’s a business model — but it’s worth naming clearly in a listing presentation.

We are about consumer choice. We are about doing the best thing that gets the highest price for your client. And normally what gets the highest price for your client is what the most number of eyeballs possible.

— JEFFREY DOUSSAN, OPERATING PRINCIPAL, KW NEW ORLEANS

A NOTE ON ZILLOW’S DATA AMBITIONS

Doussan has not historically been a Zillow enthusiast, and he doesn’t pretend otherwise. His concern has always been platform creep: Zillow has acquired dotloop (transaction management), ShowingTime(showing coordination), and Follow Up Boss (CRM) — each purchase extending Zillow’s visibility deeper into the agent-client relationship.

His read on Zillow Preview is that it doesn’t change that calculus. KW agents are not surrendering new data; they are giving Zillow listings it was going to find eventually anyway. The difference is that now the brokerage brand is attached, the lead route is direct, and the terms are known. In that framing, participating in Zillow Preview is less a concession to Zillow and more a deliberate use of the platform’s reach on the agent’s terms.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Zillow Preview hands KW New Orleans agents a concrete new tool in listing presentations — one that makes the coming-soon period a structured marketing phase rather than an informal placeholder. Caudill and Doussan are betting that an open-market approach, now amplified by Zillow’s platform reach, will outperform the exclusive-listing model Compass has been selling — especially in a balanced New Orleans market where seller exposure matters more than ever. The class is coming, the product launches soon, and the agents who understand the mechanics first will be the ones walking into listing appointments with the clearest story to tell.

About this series. KW New Orleans hosts regular conversations with the leaders shaping our city — developers, architects, investors, and operators building the New Orleans of tomorrow. These are the conversations that happen in the rooms most people don’t get invited into.

Disclaimer: This article is provided for general informational purposes only and reflects a summary of a public conversation. It is not legal advice, public safety guidance, or a guarantee of outcomes. Laws, policies, and crime trends can change, and individual situations vary. For questions about legal matters, consult a licensed attorney. For real estate questions, consult a licensed real estate broker, and verify any neighborhood-specific concerns through appropriate official sources.

This article was originally published on our website, which can be accessed here.

TITLE & TRANSACTION RISK — TAX STRATEGY — MARKET OPPORTUNITY

Robert J. Bergeron, Principal of Crescent Title, on seller impersonation schemes targeting vacant land, what agents miss inside a title commitment, and the short-term rental tax strategy that can flip a high-income earner’s tax bill upside down.

INTERVIEW BY CODY CAUDILL & JEFFREY DOUSSAN, TEAM LEADER & OPERATING PRINCIPAL, KW NEW ORLEANS · KW NEW ORLEANS · MAY 2026

WHY IT MATTERS

Real estate fraud is no longer a distant warning in a compliance training video. It closed a deal, dispersed commissions, recorded a deed, and wired funds — all the way through — before a small Harahancredit union caught a name-and-account mismatch and pulled the transaction back from the edge. The actual sellers, a couple in their early 90s, had no idea their property was being sold.

Robert J. Bergeron has seen this movie before — multiple times — and he came to the KW New Orleans office not just to warn agents, but to walk them through the exact anatomy of a scheme that nearly worked. He also stayed long enough to map out two other things that matter deeply to every agent in the room: what a title commitment is actually telling you, and why a high-income client sitting on the sidelines of real estate investment may be leaving a six-figure tax refund on the table.

Robert J. Bergeron

PRINCIPAL — CRESCENT TITLE

Bob Bergeron arrives at a KW New Orleans session the way he apparently arrives everywhere — with too much energy for a chair and a whiteboard’s worth of material already loaded. He built Crescent Title into a firm that agents trust not just to close deals, but to catch the ones that should never close. He teaches tax strategy to his own staff, runs internal phishing simulations to harden his team against fraud, uses AI to stress-test his own reasoning, and once helped a buyer on Royal Street navigate an open lis pendens before it became someone else’s nightmare. The throughline in everything he does: he wants buyers and agents to walk out of a closing knowing exactly what they got — not find out two years later what they missed.

THE STATE OF PLAY

Seller impersonation fraud has evolved. The schemes that once relied on overseas bad actors who avoided phone calls are now being executed by domestic operators who will talk to you, notarize documents, and send FedEx packages — all while routing your wire into an account set up to forward funds the moment they land.

01. Seller impersonation is the active threat. The most recent case at Crescent Title involved vacant land, two reputable agents, a notarized power of attorney, and a seller who spoke fluently by phone. Nothing tripped a wire until a small credit union noticed the name on the account didn’t match the wire recipient.

02. Vacant land is the preferred target. There’s no tenant to call, no utility account to verify, and often no reason for the real owner to be monitoring the property. Bergeron’s standard protocol — mailing a confirmation letter to the address on file with the assessor — was not followed in this case. That gap nearly cost everyone.

03. Disbarred notaries and misrouted packages are red flags agents can’t see in real time. In the Harahan case, the FedEx package listed as originating from Pennsylvania actually shipped from Houston, and the notary on the power of attorney had been disbarred. Neither fact was visible at the closing table.

04. The FBI wire kill switch exists — but the window is narrow. Once a fraudulent wire is sent, agents and title companies must contact the FBI immediately. If the funds are forwarded to a country without a financial cooperation protocol with the U.S., recovery becomes effectively impossible.

“The fraudster gets into your email, and they just sit there, and they’re very patient. They’ll wait months until you get a deal on the contract, and they’ll just watch it, and when it’s ready — about three or four days before the closing — they’re gonna have an email coming from you to the buyer.” — ROBERT J. BERGERON, PRINCIPAL, CRESCENT TITLE

WHAT GOOD DUE DILIGENCE ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE

Bergeron doesn’t place the blame for fraud solely at the feet of title companies. The listing agent is the first line of defense — and in the Harahancase, some standard front-end steps weren’t taken that might have surfaced the impersonation before a contract was ever signed.

On vacant land transactions especially, Bergeron’s firm typically mails a confirmation letter to the address the assessor has on file for the property owner. It’s a simple step. It was skipped here because two experienced agents were involved and the signals of legitimacy were strong — a mistake Bergeron describes candidly as letting their guard down. He also recommends using BankServe to dispatch a vetted notary directly, rather than accepting a notary the seller selects.

For agents fielding new buyer or seller inquiries, Bergeron and the KW New Orleans team converged on a practical screen: require a mobile phone number before proceeding, run it through Forewarn, and if the profile comes back empty or the name doesn’t match, stop. A blank account with no attached identity is not a person you should be working with.

READING A TITLE COMMITMENT BEFORE THE TABLE

The closing disclosure and title commitment are two documents that most buyers skim and most agents forward without a second look. Bergeron made a pointed case that this habit is costing buyers — sometimes quietly, sometimes catastrophically.

A title commitment issued to a lender outlines exactly what encumbrances, liens, or open matters must be resolved before the title company will insure the property. On a recent closing on Royal Street in the French Quarter, a buyer who actually read his commitment discovered an unpaid lien that had been satisfied but never formally canceled, plus an open lis pendens — a recorded notice of pending litigation — filed by a contractor who had sued over unpaid work. The buyer negotiated both issues down before closing. Had he not read the commitment, he would have inherited the problem.

Beyond liens, Bergeron emphasized that commitments surface things buyers genuinely need to know before they make plans: common alleyways, shared driveways, boundary agreements, perpetual servitudes, and tax sale titles. His firm conducts a 30-plus year abstract on every property. A servitude granting a neighbor the right to cross your yard every day isn’t just a legal footnote — it can make a planned fence or pool addition impossible. These are facts a buyer should have before they sign, not after they’ve already started drawing up renovation plans.

“You don’t want to find out at the table. You want to find out earlier.” — ROBERT J. BERGERON, PRINCIPAL, CRESCENT TITLE

THE SHORT-TERM RENTAL TAX STRATEGY

This is the part of the conversation where Bergeron pulled out a hypothetical — a doctor with $300,000 in net income and few deductions — and walked the room through a tax strategy that, when executed correctly with a CPA, can convert a six-figure tax bill into a refund.

The mechanism is a combination of the short-term rental (STR) loopholeand cost segregation. Here’s the distinction that matters: under IRS rules, a standard long-term rental property is treated as a passive investment. Passive losses from a rental can generally only offset passive income — meaning a high-earning surgeon can’t use losses from a fourplex to offset the income from her day job. A short-term rental, however, is treated more like an active business. If the owner spends 100 or more hours managing it and more hours than anyone else involved in the property, those losses can be applied against active income.

Layer in cost segregation — a process where a qualified firm breaks a property down into its component parts and assigns accelerated depreciation schedules to items with shorter useful lives (lighting, cabinetry, flooring, exit signage) — and the numbers shift dramatically. On a $1 million property, Bergeron estimates that 30–40% of the purchase price may qualify for accelerated depreciation in year one. At 35%, that’s $350,000 in deductions. Against a $300,000 income, the doctor’s taxable income goes negative — generating a loss carryforward and likely triggering a refund on quarterly estimates already paid. Per Bergeron’s illustration, a physician facing a roughly $120,000 tax liability could instead receive a refund of approximately $20,000.

Bergeron was careful to flag that not every property marketed with this pitch is priced honestly. He described a California buyer who contracted a property near the French Quarter for $1.2 million that appraised at $900,000 — a scheme where an out-of-market promoter had cut a side deal with the seller to pocket the spread above market value, cutting the buyer’s agent out entirely. The strategy is legitimate. The execution requires a CPA who knows the rules, a properly qualified property, and an agent who understands what’s actually being bought.

“ Defer, defer and die. Because when you die, your heirs inherit at the stepped-up basis — that tax goes away.” — ROBERT J. BERGERON, PRINCIPAL, CRESCENT TITLE

THE LONGER GAME: GENERATIONAL WEALTH & 1031S

Bergeron closed the tax conversation by pulling the lens back from year-one deductions to what real estate actually builds over a lifetime — and what it can pass on.

In his succession work, he regularly sees estates where the liquid assets are nearly gone — a few hundred dollars in checking, a modest retirement account — but a paid-off $400,000 house represents the entire legacy a family will carry forward. Real estate held long-term, depreciated strategically, and exchanged through 1031 exchanges when the time comes can defer capital gains indefinitely. And at death, heirs receive a stepped-up cost basis, effectively erasing the deferred tax liability that accumulated over a lifetime of smart investing.

For investors who want the tax deferral without the operational burden — no broken toilets, no rent collection — Bergeron pointed to the Delaware Statutory Trust (DST) as a 1031-eligible vehicle. A DST pools investor capital into a professionally managed portfolio of commercial properties, often diversified across multiple asset classes and geographies. Investors receive a proportional ownership interest and monthly distributions, while a management company handles operations. He referenced a local family that sold a portfolio of student housing properties near Tulane during the COVID era and placed the proceeds into DSTs, some of which are now invested in assisted living facilities across the country.

AI AS A PROFESSIONAL TOOL

Bergeron isn’t using artificial intelligence to replace judgment — he’s using it to pressure-test it. Crescent Title has set up a shared drive where complex title problems can be run through an AI model to surface angles the team might not have considered.

He described using AI to draft a disclosure letter to a buyer about a tax sale title problem — feeding in the relevant facts and asking the model to help structure a clear, thorough communication that would hold up as documentation if the buyer later claimed they weren’t warned. He also uses it when preparing tax education sessions, specifically asking it to push back: tell me where this reasoning might be wrong, what pitfalls could someone run into.It’s a tool for staying sharp, not for cutting corners.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Seller impersonation fraud cleared every checkpoint in a recent Crescent Title transaction — two good agents, a notarized POA, live phone calls — and only a small credit union’s name-matching protocol stopped the wire from disappearing. Bergeron’s message is not that the system is broken but that agents must own the front-end steps: mail the assessor letter on vacant land, verify the notary, require a phone number and run Forewarn before the conversation goes further. On the opportunity side, he sees the current supply environment in the French Quarter and around university corridors as a genuine buy-low window — particularly for high-income clients whose CPAs understand cost segregation and the short-term rental active-loss rules. The agents who can connect those dots for a doctor or a business owner aren’t just closing a transaction. They’re changing a client’s financial trajectory.

About this series. KW New Orleans hosts regular conversations with the leaders shaping our city — developers, architects, investors, and operators building the New Orleans of tomorrow. These are the conversations that happen in the rooms most people don’t get invited into.

Disclaimer: This article is provided for general informational purposes only and reflects a summary of a public conversation. It is not legal advice, public safety guidance, or a guarantee of outcomes. Laws, policies, and crime trends can change, and individual situations vary. For questions about legal matters, consult a licensed attorney. For real estate questions, consult a licensed real estate broker, and verify any neighborhood-specific concerns through appropriate official sources.

This article was originally published on our website, which can be accessed here.

COMMUNITY & CITY BUILDING — CHILDREN’S HEALTH

Anamaría Villamarín-Lupin, Director of Specialty Practices at Manning Family Children’s, on Walker’s Imaginarium, the programs serving New Orleans families every day, and what a sick eight-year-old’s dream is about to become reality.

INTERVIEW BY LAUREN DOUSSAN, PRINCIPAL, KW NEW ORLEANS · KW NEW ORLEANS · APRIL 2026

WHY IT MATTERS

A children’s hospital is where families go when things go wrong. What Manning Family Children’sis building right now is something different — a 15,000-square-foot play facility born from a child’s wish, a Ryan Seacrest Foundation multimedia studio, and a suite of community programs that reach New Orleans families long before anyone ever needs a hospital bed.

Anamaría Villamarín-Lupin oversees the programs that face outward: the Parenting Center, the GNO Immunization Network, the Miracle League, and the soon-to-open Walker’s Imaginarium. She sat down with Lauren Doussan to walk through all of it — and to tell the story of the boy whose idea started it all.

Anamaría Villamarín-Lupin

DIRECTOR OF SPECIALTY PRACTICES — MANNING FAMILY CHILDREN’S

She was born in Colombia and landed in Connecticut at twelve — a jarring introduction to the United States that she navigated largely by eventually finding a city that felt like home. She followed a boy to New Orleans (her words), fell for the place as hard as the person, and has now lived here for nearly thirty years. After studying psychology at Williams College and earning her Master’s in Social Work at Tulane, she built a career in public service, eventually becoming Deputy Director of the Mayor’s Office of Youth and Family Services, where she helped administer the city’s Early Childhood millage. Manning Family Children’s pulled her into the hospital world, where she now shepherds programs ranging from a 46-year-old parenting center to a 28-year-old mobile immunization network to the Miracle Leaguesports program for children with disabilities. The thread running through all of it: she’d rather talk about the kid who sold lemonade to fight cancer than recite her own credentials.

THE STATE OF PLAY

Manning Family Children’s has reframed its external-facing work under a “community impact” banner — a deliberate shift away from the language of charity toward something that sounds more like partnership. Here’s what that looks like in practice.

1. Walker’s Imaginarium is a 15,000-square-foot children’s museum-style facility under construction at the hospital. Pile driving began in July 2025, and a mid-November 2026 opening is projected. It will be free for patients and open to the public one day per week.

2. The Seacrest Studio — the 15th installation of the Ryan Seacrest Foundation’s multimedia production program — will be housed inside Walker’s Imaginarium, making it the only such studio nested inside a children’s museum inside a hospital.

3. Thrive Kids embeds mental health practitioners and nurses in New Orleans public schools, with care coordinators who follow up with families, remove transportation barriers, and connect children to ongoing care.

4. The Morgan Ray Center of Hope, the hospital’s child advocacy center for victims of abuse and trafficking, recently received a $1 million gift from Trey Carter to sustain its work.

“Our CEO likes to say that we are in the business of making sure kids have birthdays for the rest of their lives. And so that’s our impact, right? More birthdays.” — ANAMARÍA VILLAMARÍN-LUPIN, DIRECTOR OF SPECIALTY PRACTICES, MANNING FAMILY CHILDREN’S

WALKER BEERY & THE DREAM THAT BUILT IT

Every capital project has a ribbon-cutting. Walker’s Imaginarium has something rarer: a founding story that is genuinely hard to forget.

Walker Beery was a New Orleans boy diagnosed with a rare, aggressive form of brain cancer. He spent long stretches at Manning Family Children’s, and during that time, a simple act of kindness from a fellow patient moved him enough to want to pay it forward. He started selling lemonade and built a movement — Kids Join the Fight — that rallied children to raise funds against cancer. The kapow signs you may have spotted around Uptown? That was Walker.

He also had an idea about the hospital itself. Visits from friends were cramped and limited. He wanted something more — a playground, a place to have fun. The hospital’s CEO at the time took the conversation seriously and pushed Walker to dream bigger. What emerged from that exchange, over time, became the vision for a 15,000-square-foot facility with a butterfly sculpture, a Louisiana porch-life play area, a Mardi Gras float, an air boat simulator, a nine-hole mini golf course, and a stage — because Walker loved to dance. Walker passed away at age eight in 2021. He did not live to see the ground broken. Construction started in July 2025.

The philanthropic engine behind the project is Kids Join the Fight, the 501(c)(3) Walker founded, which provided the seed funding. Every element of Walker’s Imaginarium has been funded entirely through philanthropy and donations — no hospital operating budget, no government line item.

WHAT’S INSIDE

The design reflects both Walker’s personality and a serious commitment to accessibility — every exhibit was shaped by input from patients, families, medical staff, and rehabilitation teams.

The centerpiece of the entry atrium is a large butterfly sculpture by artist Christopher Scharf, known for large-scale kinetic installations at Burning Man. Visitors sit on an accessible swing — with a wheelchair ramp built in — and as they swing, their movement animates the butterfly’s wings. The wind from those wings causes shimmering LED discs above to flutter. It is the first thing you see when you walk in.

From there: a “porch life” creative play area with a pretend crawfish boil, a performance stage (no food or drink, but plenty of dancing), a Krewe of Walker Mardi Gras float built by the Kern family with pneumatic-tube scarf throws, an oversized foosball table, an air boat simulator, and an interactive LED forest that responds to movement. Artist Alex Beard was commissioned to paint a bayou scene that will be reproduced as wallpaper across two full walls. Outside, under an overhang with fans, sits a nine-hole miniature golf course — all holes fully accessible, two designed as skee-ball-style ramps.

The Seacrest Studio sits inside Walker’s Imaginarium itself — Villamarín-Lupin describes it as “Russian dolls” of fun. The studio will broadcast programming to every patient room in the hospital, and it’s interactive: children who cannot come down to the facility can still participate. The most popular program at every Ryan Seacrest Foundation studio across the country is bingo.

“Walkers will have the secret studio that will open after we open walkers, and that is going to be life changing too. Because it’s the way to bring programs, and we have our own channel, and we’ll be able to broadcast anything and everything that’s happening in walkers and in the studio, because we&#ll have programs to every single room.” — ANAMARÍA VILLAMARÍN-LUPIN, DIRECTOR OF SPECIALTY PRACTICES, MANNING FAMILY CHILDREN’S

THE PROGRAMS ALREADY RUNNING

Walker’s Imaginarium is the headline, but Villamarín-Lupin oversees programs that have been serving New Orleans families for decades — most of them available to the community regardless of whether you ever set foot in the hospital.

The Parenting Center, founded in 1980 in partnership with the Junior League, is a free resource for parents to build community, troubleshoot, and develop skills. Every Tuesday at 10:30 a.m., it hosts a new parent group — in person near the hospital, with a virtual option that survived from the COVID era. Villamarín-Lupin used it herself as a new parent.

The GNO Immunization Network is 28 years old. It started as a bus that drove to neighborhoods and offered free vaccines; the bus is gone, but the program continues, now partnering with community organizations to provide free vaccines — all required childhood immunizations plus HPV, flu, and COVID — to children ages zero to 18, regardless of insurance status.

The Miracle League is a 501(c)(3) that partners with the hospital to run baseball, basketball, and kickball for children with any type of disability or special need. Games are played at the Audubon fly, with a second program at Coquille State Park on the North Shore.

The hospital also runs the Thrive Kids program, embedding mental health practitioners and nurses into New Orleans public schools with care coordinators who actively remove barriers — including paying for rideshare transportation — to keep families connected to care after the initial referral. And the ventilator-assisted living program supports approximately 150 children across Louisiana who are home on ventilators, with dedicated social workers assigned to each family.

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR NEW ORLEANS FAMILIES

For anyone moving to New Orleans, evaluating neighborhoods, or advising families on where to plant roots, healthcare infrastructure matters — and Manning Family Children’s is a significant part of the calculus.

The hospital says yes to every patient regardless of ability to pay. That commitment costs roughly $16 millionannually, according to Villamarín-Lupin, and is sustained through the hospital’s Kids Fund — the vehicle for public donations, including its GiveNOLA Day campaigns. The hospital is also in the middle of a NICU expansion to 60 beds, driven by chronic capacity constraints, and operates the only inpatient behavioral health unit for children in the region, with 51 beds.

Beyond the clinical side, the community programs described here are available to New Orleans residents now. The Parenting Center does not require a patient relationship. The GNO Immunization Networkwill come to your organization’s space. The Miracle League is open to any family with a child who has special needs. These are resources worth knowing and worth sharing.

“You don’t have to be sick to come to the parenting center, and so and then, and then, if it does happen, if your child does have some kind of illness or something that requires hospitalization or hospital care right down the street is as good as it gets down that street.” — ANAMARÍA VILLAMARÍN-LUPIN, DIRECTOR OF SPECIALTY PRACTICES, MANNING FAMILY CHILDREN’S

HOW TO GET INVOLVED

Villamarín-Lupin was direct about where community support makes the biggest difference: time, dollars, and word of mouth.

1. Volunteer Services at Manning Family Children’s has a formal program. The Parenting Center, Miracle League, and Walker’s Imaginarium (upon opening) all need hands-on support.

2. The Kids Fund is the primary giving vehicle. Donations made through GiveNOLA Day to Manning Family Children’s go directly to ensuring the hospital can say yes to every family, every time.

3. Walker’s Imaginarium is 100% philanthropy-funded. Construction and future operations both depend on ongoing donor relationships. The facility will also be available for private events after opening.

4. Refer new parents to the Parenting Center’s Tuesday morning new parent group — 10:30 a.m., in person and virtual. It is free and has been running for over 40 years.

THE BOTTOM LINE

A boy named Walker Beery sold lemonade, dreamed of a rooftop playground, and set in motion something that will open its doors in New Orleans by mid-November 2026 — a 15,000-square-foot space with a kinetic butterfly, a Mardi Gras float, a nine-hole putt-putt course, and a Ryan Seacrest Foundation studio broadcasting to every room in the building. That facility sits on top of a hospital that also runs a 46-year-old parenting center, a 28-year-old free immunization network, a sports league for children with disabilities, and a school-embedded mental health program that pays for Lyft rides so families don’t lose their connection to care. For real estate professionals telling the story of this city, this is part of what “quality of life in New Orleans” actually means — and it’s only getting larger.

About this series. KW New Orleans hosts regular conversations with the leaders shaping our city — developers, architects, investors, and operators building the New Orleans of tomorrow. These are the conversations that happen in the rooms most people don’t get invited into.

Disclaimer: This article is provided for general informational purposes only and reflects a summary of a public conversation. It is not legal advice, public safety guidance, or a guarantee of outcomes. Laws, policies, and crime trends can change, and individual situations vary. For questions about legal matters, consult a licensed attorney. For real estate questions, consult a licensed real estate broker, and verify any neighborhood-specific concerns through appropriate official sources.

This article was originally published on our website, which can be accessed here.

BROKER EDUCATION · MLS BEST PRACTICES

The KW New Orleans leadership team on what belongs in agent remarks, what belongs in public remarks, and what one wrong sentence can cost you at the closing table.

WITH CODY CAUDILL, JEFFREY DOUSSAN & NICHOLE DONALD · KW NEW ORLEANS · APRIL 2026

WHY IT MATTERS

A single line in the agent remarks section of an MLS listing can unravel months of work. It can trigger a lender-required structural inspection, flag a property to an underwriter, or quietly disclose something that was never meant to be disclosed publicly — and never should have been written down by an agent at all.

This is not a theoretical risk. During a recent KW New Orleans broker session, Cody Caudill, Jeffrey Doussan, and Nichole Donald walked agents through real scenarios where careless or well-intentioned remarks created serious problems — from deals falling apart at underwriting to agents inadvertently practicing outside their license. The conversation is a masterclass in a topic most agents treat as an afterthought.

Cody Caudill, Jeffrey Doussan & Nichole Donald

TEAM LEADER, OPERATING PRINCIPAL & COACH AND CO-BROKER — KW NEW ORLEANS

Together, this trio runs the day-to-day coaching, brokerage oversight, and agent development at KW New Orleans. What makes their broker sessions distinctive is that they draw on live, real-world situations — not textbook examples. In this session, that meant dissecting what actually happened when a lender accessed agent remarks and required a structural inspection, when a non-warrantable condo disclosure nearly blew up a closing, and when an agent crossed the line from describing a property to offering an expert opinion they weren’t qualified to give. Their standard: if you wouldn’t say it out loud to a room full of lawyers, don’t type it into a remarks field.

THE STATE OF PLAY

Agent remarks are not a private journal. Lenders, underwriters, and Fannie Mae guidelines can all be triggered by language that agents assume will only ever be read by another licensee. Here’s what the KW New Orleans leadership team flagged as the most pressing issues.

01. Lender access to agent remarks is real. When a listing agent noted that a property “may need structural work,” that language reached the buyer’s lender — who then required a formal structural inspection before the loan could proceed. The agent created a condition they never intended.

02. Non-warrantable condos require precise, proactive disclosure. If a condo association has outstanding structural damage assessments, conventional financing through Fannie Mae, FHA, or VA may be unavailable. Agents who omit this send buyers and their lenders down a dead-end road.

03. Scope of license is a hard boundary. Describing visible discoloration on sheetrock as “black mold” or flagging something as a structural defect crosses into territory that belongs to scientists and engineers — not agents. The language agents use carries legal weight.

04. Open house information has a dedicated MLS field — it does not belong in public or agent remarks. This is a compliance issue, not a preference, and agents who route open house details through remarks fields create unnecessary risk.

WHEN AGENT REMARKS BECOME A LIABILITY

The most instructive moment in the session came from a real transaction where an agent referenced a structural engineering document inside the agent remarks field. The intent was to be transparent. The result was that an underwriter flagged the document at the tail end of the deal, stalling a closing that had been on track. Transparency is not the problem — placement and language are.

The distinction the leadership team draws is clear: agent remarks exist for logistical, agent-to-agent communication. Phone numbers, showing instructions, access codes. If information rises to the level of a material disclosure, it belongs in the public remarks or in the formal disclosure documents — not tucked into a field that agents might assume flies under the radar.

“You don’t want to be only disclosing things to agents. If it’s disclose something you need to disclose, put it, say it in public.” — JEFFREY DOUSSAN, OPERATING PRINCIPAL, KW NEW ORLEANS

THE NON-WARRANTABLE CONDO PROBLEM

One agent in the session shared a scenario that illustrated the stakes clearly: a condo listing went under contract, and the buyer’s lender declined to approve the association because of a structural damage assessment against it. The property was effectively a cash-only or non-traditional financing deal — and buyers arriving with FHA, VA, or standard conventional loans were wasting everyone’s time.

The solution the group landed on was putting “non-warrantable condo” language directly in the agent remarks — so buyer’s agents could filter before showing. The group also noted that some lenders can still warrant condos that fall outside traditional guidelines, which means the conversation with the buyer’s agent doesn’t have to end at the remarks field. It’s a starting point, not a verdict.

“If their client has special financing, that agent needs to know. I can’t show them this.” — SESSION PARTICIPANT, KW NEW ORLEANS

WHAT AGENT REMARKS ARE ACTUALLY FOR

Once you strip out everything that doesn’t belong, what’s left? The KW New Orleans team kept it simple: call me at this number, 24-hour notice required, proof of funds. Logistical details that help a buyer’s agent prepare for a showing without creating any exposure for the listing agent or their client.

The temptation to over-communicate in remarks usually comes from a good place — agents want to save everyone time and avoid bad-fit showings. But the discipline required is to ask one question before typing anything: does this belong in a public-facing disclosure, or is this purely a coordination detail? If it’s the former, it goes in the formal documents. If it’s the latter, it goes in agent remarks. If it’s neither — if it’s an opinion or an amateur diagnosis — it doesn’t get written down at all.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Words in MLS remarks fields carry real consequences: a structural note triggers a lender condition, a non-warrantable condo goes undisclosed and blows up at underwriting, a sheetrock description crosses into unlicensed expert opinion. The KW New Orleans leadership team is drawing a hard line — agent remarks are for logistics, public remarks and disclosure documents are for material facts, and anything that requires a license you don’t hold should never be typed at all. Get those boundaries right, and you protect your clients, your deals, and your license.

About this series. KW New Orleans hosts regular conversations with the leaders shaping our city — developers, architects, investors, and operators building the New Orleans of tomorrow. These are the conversations that happen in the rooms most people don’t get invited into.

Disclaimer: This article is provided for general informational purposes only and reflects a summary of a public conversation. It is not legal advice, public safety guidance, or a guarantee of outcomes. Laws, policies, and crime trends can change, and individual situations vary. For questions about legal matters, consult a licensed attorney. For real estate questions, consult a licensed real estate broker, and verify any neighborhood-specific concerns through appropriate official sources.

This article was originally published on our website, which can be accessed here.

MARKET INTELLIGENCE · ZONING & DUE DILIGENCE

Cody Caudill and Jeffrey Doussan on how to read New Orleans zoning before you commit — and why a single letter can make or break a deal.

CONVERSATION WITH CODY CAUDILL & JEFFREY DOUSSAN, TEAM LEADER & OPERATING PRINCIPAL · KW NEW ORLEANS · APRIL 2026

WHY IT MATTERS

Someone falls in love with a building. They picture a live music venue, a boutique hotel, a creative mixed-use concept. They come to their agent fired up. And the honest answer — the one that saves them months of wasted time and real money — is two words: go check.

In a recent conversation at the KW New Orleans office, Team Leader Cody Caudill and Operating Principal Jeffrey Doussan walked through exactly how they approach that check — live, on a real property, using the tools any agent or buyer can access today. What emerged was a practical primer on one of the most misread aspects of New Orleans real estate: zoning.

Cody Caudill & Jeffrey Doussan

TEAM LEADER & OPERATING PRINCIPAL — KW NEW ORLEANS

Cody Caudill didn’t come up through a single market — he built his understanding of real estate by watching how different cities handle the same problems, which is exactly why New Orleans’ zoning structure stands out to him. Jeffrey Doussan runs the business side of KW New Orleans and estimates he’s at property.nola.gov three or four times a week — not because he has to be, but because he knows the site is where deals either make sense or fall apart before any offer gets written. Together, they represent a rare combination: the agent’s instinct for what a property can become and the operator’s discipline for knowing when the city will say no. Their shared conviction is that conditional use designations are one of the biggest hidden risks in New Orleans commercial real estate right now — and that the current mayoral administration has a real opportunity to change that.

THE STATE OF PLAY

New Orleans zoning is publicly accessible — but accessible doesn’t mean readable. The city aggregates property data from multiple sources in one place, and knowing how to navigate that system is the difference between a confident offer and an expensive mistake.

01. property.nola.gov is the starting point. The site pulls from the assessor’s records, the Comprehensive Zoning Ordinance (CCO), and the municipal code — including any variances or conditional uses attached to a specific parcel.

02. The zoning description link inside the site takes you directly into the CCO, where every permitted and conditional use for that zone is listed. It looks straightforward. It isn’t.

03. “P” vs. “C” designations are the most critical distinction. A “P” means permitted by right — you can buy and move forward. A “C” means conditional use, which requires a separate approval process that costs time, money, and carries no guarantee of success.

04. Commercial vs. residential sorting inside the CCO trips up even experienced readers. The document lists residential uses at the top — even for commercially zoned properties — which can create false impressions about what’s actually allowed.

“To an untrained eye, you will read this wrong, in my opinion.” — CODY CAUDILL, TEAM LEADER, KW NEW ORLEANS

HOW TO ACTUALLY USE THE SITE

The workflow Caudill and Doussan described isn’t complicated — but it requires knowing what you’re looking at and, more importantly, what you’re looking for.

Start at property.nola.gov, pull the assessor’s record, and look directly beneath it for the zoning designation. Click the zoning description link and it routes you into the CCO — the city’s comprehensive zoning ordinance — where the full list of uses for that zone lives. Scan for your intended use, find its designation, and note whether it’s a “P” or a “C.”

The municipal code layer matters too. Variances and conditional uses that have already been granted on a specific property will appear there — meaning a parcel might have permissions that go beyond or differ from its base zoning. That’s the kind of detail that can surface an opportunity or reveal a complication that no one mentioned at the listing presentation.

When something in the code doesn’t make sense — and it will — that’s the moment to make phone calls. The site is the research. The call is the confirmation.

“If it’s p, that means permitted, and we can do it, you can buy it and get going. You’ve got it by right. If it’s C, I don’t know how much money you got. You want to waste time, time and money, and you still may not get it right.” — JEFFREY DOUSSAN, OPERATING PRINCIPAL, KW NEW ORLEANS

THE CONDITIONAL USE PROBLEM

The volume of conditional use designations in New Orleans zoning isn’t just a bureaucratic inconvenience — it’s a structural drag on development, investment, and the kind of adaptive reuse projects the city talks about wanting more of.

Caudill made a point that cuts to the heart of it: almost every zone in New Orleans carries some sort of commercial use option. The problem isn’t availability in theory — it’s that too many of those uses sit behind a conditional approval process that is slow, uncertain, and expensive to pursue. A buyer who wants to open a live music venue or convert a building to hotel use isn’t automatically blocked. They’re just sent into a process with no guaranteed outcome.

Both Caudill and Doussan named this as something they’re watching under the current mayoral administration — a specific policy pressure point where Mayor Marino’s team, and the city’s new zoning leadership, has a concrete opportunity to reduce friction for developers and property owners who are trying to do something productive with underutilized buildings.

“It’s one of the things that we’re hoping gets fixed in this administration, less conditional uses.” — MJ (GUEST), KW NEW ORLEANS CONVERSATION

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR BUYERS & AGENTS

The practical takeaway is simple: zoning research is not optional, and it is not something to do after an offer is accepted. It belongs at the front end of every commercial evaluation — before the conversation about price, before the showing, certainly before any client starts mentally designing their concept.

For agents, walking a client through property.nola.gov live — the way Caudill and Doussan demonstrated in this conversation — is one of the clearest ways to establish expertise and protect the people you’re working with. It turns an abstract concern into a specific answer, and it sets the right expectations before anyone falls in love with a vision the zoning code won’t support.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Caudill and Doussan aren’t warning people away from ambitious projects in New Orleans — they’re insisting those projects start with the right question. Pull up property.nola.gov, find the zoning designation, and look for the letter next to your intended use. A “P” means you move. A “C” means you calculate. And if the current administration follows through on reducing conditional use designations, the calculus for adaptive reuse in this city gets meaningfully better — which is worth watching closely.

About this series. KW New Orleans hosts regular conversations with the leaders shaping our city — developers, architects, investors, and operators building the New Orleans of tomorrow. These are the conversations that happen in the rooms most people don’t get invited into.

Disclaimer: This article is provided for general informational purposes only and reflects a summary of a public conversation. It is not legal advice, public safety guidance, or a guarantee of outcomes. Laws, policies, and crime trends can change, and individual situations vary. For questions about legal matters, consult a licensed attorney. For real estate questions, consult a licensed real estate broker, and verify any neighborhood-specific concerns through appropriate official sources.

This article was originally published on our website, which can be accessed here.

LEADERSHIP & CULTURE — KW NEW ORLEANS

MJ Sauer, Associate Broker and KW New Orleans original, on building a life by design through real estate investing, why she finally took one meeting she’d been saying no to for years — and what it looks like when a decade of disciplined goal-setting actually pays off.

INTERVIEW BY JEFFREY DOUSSAN, OPERATING PRINCIPAL · KW NEW ORLEANS · APRIL 2026

WHY IT MATTERS

Most agents talk about real estate as the path to wealth. MJ Sauer is one of the rare ones who mapped the route, set a finish line, and crossed it on schedule — at 53, with her mortgages paid off and her time finally her own. Her story isn’t a motivational anecdote. It’s a blueprint for what this business can actually become.

At a recent KW New Orleans office gathering, Sauer took the front of the room to share what she’s built — and what comes next. After years as co-broker alongside Clayton, she’s stepping into what she calls her “enjoyment phase”: still in the office, still part of the team, still invested in the culture she helped create. The occasion also brought a major introduction: Nichole Donald, former team leader at KW West Bank, joining as Coach and Co-Broker. And woven throughout the morning was a practical, urgent conversation about business planning, leverage, and using AI to stop losing agents to the homework gap.

MJ Sauer

ASSOCIATE BROKER — KW NEW ORLEANS

MJ Sauer had a license since 1999 and a hard rule: she never took a meeting with another broker. Not one — until a phone call from Jeffrey Doussanlanded differently, and she agreed to sit down at The Station on Bienville on a Tuesday morning. What changed her mind wasn’t the pitch. It was the recognition that the boutique brokerage model she’d run for 14 years was no longer sustainable in a world shifting toward larger platforms and bigger technology. She joined KW New Orleans just before COVID hit, ran her team through that disruption, and used the forced stillness of the pandemic to rebuild from the inside out. Along the way, she and her husband bought and sold over 60 properties, put everything on 10-year notes starting in 2013, and hit their freedom number exactly when they planned: 2023. She’s still here — her son James and colleague Jesse both work alongside her at KW New Orleans — and she’s not a cautionary tale or an overnight success. She’s what a decade of disciplined, goal-aligned investing actually looks like.

THE STATE OF PLAY

Three separate but connected threads ran through the morning: a leadership evolution, a business planning push, and a new face stepping into a coaching role designed to close the gap between agents who have plans and agents who don’t.

01. MJ Sauer enters her enjoyment phase. After years as co-broker alongside Clayton, Sauer is shifting her focus from leadership to living — a move she gave Jeffrey Doussan 18 months of notice on. She’s not going anywhere. Her son James and colleague Jesse remain at KW New Orleans, and she intends to stay connected to the office and culture she helped build.

02. Nichole Donald joins as Coach and Co-Broker. A 16-plus-year industry veteran, former KW West Bank team leader, and three-year productivity coach, Donald brings a structured framework — her “three P’s” — to helping agents build predictable, productive, and profitable businesses.

03. Business planning with AI. Lauren Doussan and the leadership team are running an ALC Plus series pushing agents to finish their business plans and use AI tools to translate those plans into daily, weekly, and monthly action steps — compressing months of coaching follow-up into a single working session.

04. Leverage as a growth strategy. A recurring theme across all three threads: identifying what only you can do, and offloading everything else. From transaction coordination to photography to social media scheduling, the conversation keeps returning to the question of where agents are spending time they don’t need to spend.

“From the beginning, my goal was never to be an agent. My goal was never to be a broker. I did these things without really knowing about them. This life by design, I just clearly figured out what I needed.”— MJ SAUER, ASSOCIATE BROKER, KW NEW ORLEANS

THE 10-YEAR PLAN THAT ACTUALLY WORKED

In 2013, MJ Sauer and her husband sat down and built a number. Not a vague aspiration — a specific financial target that would let them live the way they wanted to live, with no one else’s schedule attached to it. They bought over 60 properties across their investing career, put the ones they were keeping on 10-year notes, and ran toward a 2023 payoff date like a finish line they could actually see.

She reached it at 53. The properties are paid off. The income is passive. And the thing that strikes her most — still — is how many people in this business never make that kind of move. “It blows my mind how many people are in real estate and don’t buy real estate,” she told the room. The accumulation phase, in her framing, is not just about earning — it’s about building the asset base that eventually sets you free from needing to earn.

The discipline required wasn’t glamorous. High mortgages on short notes means less cash flow in the short run. But the math, worked backward from a specific goal, made it the only logical choice. That “work backward from your goal” logic is exactly what Lauren Doussan was teaching agents in the business planning session that opened the same morning — how much GCI do you need, how many transactions does that require, what does that mean you need to do this week?

WHY SHE FINALLY TOOK THE MEETING

MJ Sauer had been in real estate since 1999. She ran her own boutique brokerage for 14 years. She had a clear life by design and goals that were on track. Every broker who called got the same answer: no.

The call from Jeffrey Doussan was different — not because of what he said, but because of what was changing around her. She had been watching Compass expand out of Chicago and understood what it signaled about where the industry was going: toward platforms with scale, technology, and training that small independents simply couldn’t match. She had paid over $10,000 for a website that largely just displayed the MLS. The boutique model, she concluded, wasn’t going to be sustainable.

She joined KW New Orleans just before COVID. The timing looked bad. It turned out to be a gift — the disruption cleared her calendar and gave her time to go deep on Keller Williams training, Gary Keller’s books, and the models and systems she hadn’t had space to absorb while chasing day-to-day operations at her own shop. The reset she didn’t plan for accelerated the trajectory she had.

“A lot of my business was built after Katrina and then covid was the next step with just coming here and really solidifying myself as part of the Keller Williams culture and team. And I wouldn’t change it for the world” — MJ SAUER, ASSOCIATE BROKER, KW NEW ORLEANS

NICHOLE DONALD: THREE P’S, NO CHEERLEADING

Nichole Donald grew up in New Orleans in the truest sense — her father served as president of the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club during Katrina, leading the organization’s return to the city in 2006. She was decorating coconuts as a kid. Roots run deep.

She spent nearly her entire real estate career at KW West Bank — 16-plus years — with one brief early detour to a boutique brokerage that lasted six months before she sat in on a class at NOMAR, looked around at who was in the room, and made her decision. She’s served as productivity coach, team leader, and director on the NOMAR board. She knows the models.

Her mandate at KW New Orleans is focused: help agents who aren’t yet capping get there. Her framework is built around three P’s — predictable, productive, and profitable. Every initiative, every conversation, every accountability check runs through that filter. And she was clear with the room from the start: she’s not the rah-rah type. She’ll celebrate wins, but she’ll hold people to what they said they were going to do.

Nichole Donald

COACH & CO-BROKER — KW NEW ORLEANS

Nichole Donald tried exactly one non-Keller Williams brokerage in her career. It lasted six months. She walked into a NOMAR class, saw the room full of KW agents, and that was the end of the experiment. She spent the next 16-plus years at KW West Bank — as agent, productivity coach, team leader, and NOMAR board director. Her father, a Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club president, led the organization’s post-Katrina return to the streets of New Orleans. She knows what it looks like to rebuild something. Now she’s bringing that same sensibility to helping agents build businesses that don’t depend on a lucky month.

THE BUSINESS PLAN IS NOT OPTIONAL

The morning opened with a practical, slightly uncomfortable exercise: Lauren Doussan and Jeffrey Doussan walking the room through a baseline worksheet — GCI, transaction count, social media metrics, all of it on paper — and asking agents to work backward from the life they actually want to the activity required to get there.

The point wasn’t to constrain anyone. Jeffrey Doussan put it this way: getting clear on the numbers creates freedom later, not less of it. The clarity is what lets you say yes to things — and know which things to say yes to. An upcoming ALC Plus session is designed to take agents’ completed plans and run them through AI tools to generate specific daily, weekly, and monthly action benchmarks, shortcutting the multi-week follow-up cycle that coaching typically requires.

The AI application being demonstrated isn’t theoretical. Jeffrey Doussan fed a transcript of Gary Vaynerchuk’s remarks at Keller Williams Family Reunion into Claude, prompted it to generate a social media action plan for a new KW New Orleans agent without nine transactions in the prior 12 months, and shared the output with the room. The session is designed to let agents get deep into ideation and action planning before they ever sit down one-on-one with a coach — making that time sharper and faster.

I’m not the rah rah coach, okay. I’m not however, I’m going to hold you accountable to whatever goals you set, and excuses are out the door.” — NICHOLE DONALD, COACH & CO-BROKER, KW NEW ORLEANS

CONSISTENCY AS THE ONLY STRATEGY THAT WORKS

The thread connecting every conversation in the room — business planning, AI tools, MJ’s investing arc, Nichole’s three P’s — is the same one: you cannot water a plant with a year’s worth of water in a single day and expect it to grow. The agents at the top of the room all have a plan, work it consistently, and don’t stop when a season is slow.

Lauren Doussan referenced a concept from author Jurgen Appelo’s writing on entrepreneurial time: adding just three focused hours on a Saturday morning translates to roughly 20 additional productive workdays per year. The math is less interesting than what it implies — that the gap between good producers and great ones is rarely talent. It’s time allocation and the willingness to protect the hours that only you can fill.

THE BOTTOM LINE

MJ Sauer didn’t stumble into financial freedom — she engineered it, starting with a number she and her husband wrote down in 2013, sustained through 60-plus property transactions and 10-year mortgage notes, and completed exactly on schedule in 2023. She’s still in the building, still part of the team, and her story is proof of concept: this business, done intentionally, leads somewhere worth going. Nichole Donald arrives with 16-plus years in the Keller Williams system, a three-part accountability framework, and a direct disposition that makes clear she’s here to move the needle on agent production, not manage the mood. The business planning push — worksheets, AI-assisted action plans, the ALC Plus series — is designed to close the gap between agents who intend to grow and agents who actually do. If you’re looking for a place where people build real wealth alongside their production — and the systems, coaching, and culture to support that — this is what it looks like from the inside.

About this series. KW New Orleans hosts regular conversations with the leaders shaping our city — developers, architects, investors, and operators building the New Orleans of tomorrow. These are the conversations that happen in the rooms most people don’t get invited into.

Disclaimer: This article is provided for general informational purposes only and reflects a summary of a public conversation. It is not legal advice, public safety guidance, or a guarantee of outcomes. Laws, policies, and crime trends can change, and individual situations vary. For questions about legal matters, consult a licensed attorney. For real estate questions, consult a licensed real estate broker, and verify any neighborhood-specific concerns through appropriate official sources.

This article was originally published on our website, which can be accessed here.

AGENT STRATEGY · SOCIAL MEDIA & AI

Brittany Picolo-Ramos, Michael Styles, and Philip Ewbank — three KW New Orleans agents at very different stages of their social media journey — on what it actually takes to build an audience, why authenticity beats production value, and what the shift from “social” to “interest” media means for every agent in this city right now.

INTERVIEW BY LAUREN DOUSSAN, PRINCIPAL · KW NEW ORLEANS · APRIL 2026

WHY IT MATTERS

The platforms have changed the rules again — and this time, the window for getting ahead is narrow. ChatGPT now indexes MLS data fed directly by Redfin, Realtor.com, and Zillow. The content agents post today is being scraped, indexed, and used to answer buyer and seller questions tomorrow. What you put out there is no longer just marketing. It is becoming your professional record inside the AI gatekeepers your clients are already starting to trust.

At a recent KW New Orleans office session, Principal Lauren Doussan gathered three agents who have been experimenting in the open — posting, failing, pivoting, and finding what actually works — for a candid conversation about content strategy in the era of interest media. The result was one of the most practically useful discussions this office has had about the subject.

Brittany Picolo-Ramos

AGENT — KW NEW ORLEANS

Brittany admits she cannot figure out DocuSign without her assistant walking her through it step by step. That confession lands differently when you learn she has built an Instagram following of nearly 18,000 people. Her philosophy is deceptively simple: give people what you would want to see, let them into your life, and let the connection do the selling. She once paid thousands for billboards and got zero calls — just people saying, “Oh, that’s Brittany.” She ditched the billboards. Her feed is the billboard now. Brittany is proof that the most effective personal brand is the one you already are.

Michael Styles

AGENT — KW NEW ORLEANS

Back in 2015, Michael was filming seven-to-ten minute neighborhood lifestyle videos — sitting down with clients in the homes he had sold them and turning the conversation into a neighborhood guide. It worked, until it didn’t. Attention spans shortened, the format aged out, and Michael had to rebuild his content strategy from the ground up. He outsources his grid content to a firm because he knows it is important even when it is not his strong suit, and he has never paid for a lead or a buyer listing. His personal brand runs on one principle: be unabashedly yourself, because in a relationship market like New Orleans, authenticity is eventually rewarded.

Philip Ewbank

AGENT — KW NEW ORLEANS

Philip started by copying the content playbook from Coffee & Contracts, a popular coaching account for real estate agents on Instagram. He optimized his handle, followed the formula, and built a respectable presence. Then he heard Gary Vaynerchuk recommend multiple handles across multiple platforms — and instead of ignoring the advice, Philip went home and launched a brand-new account called History with Phil, where he pivots mid-video from ancient Roman trade deals to a three-bedroom listing in New Orleans. One viewer complained. Philip thought that was funny. He is the kind of agent who will tell you why a transaction was great and why it was awful in the same post — and he thinks that honesty is exactly the point.

THE STATE OF PLAY

The platform landscape has shifted so fundamentally that the word “social” no longer describes what these apps actually do. Understanding the new mechanics is the prerequisite for everything else.

01. TikTok’s For You algorithm changed the game in 2017–2018 by eliminating the requirement that a viewer follow you before seeing your content. Every major platform adopted the same model. You no longer need a big following to reach a big audience.

02. ChatGPT + MLS data is the newest frontier. As of this session, Redfin, Realtor.com, and Zillow are feeding MLS data directly into ChatGPT. AI is becoming the first stop for buyers and sellers researching the market — and it will surface agents whose content establishes expertise.

03. Gary Vaynerchuk’s 2026 declaration that social media is dead and “interest media” has replaced it is not just semantics. The algorithm no longer shows people their friends. It shows people their interests. Agents who produce content around specific questions and topics will be fed to the exact audience asking those questions.

04. Cross-collaboration is an underused growth strategy. When Michael brought lender Matt Hilling from On Pathonto his content, both professionals gained access to each other’s audiences — without either of them paying for exposure.

“The content I post is I try to just put like little feelers out there. A lot of the questions that I get from people, prospective buyers, prospective sellers, sellers and buyers, what they’re asking me about — so basic first time homebuyer questions that I get from a transaction that I have — and I might already know the answer. So, for example, just off the top of my head, is it too late to keep shopping interest rates once I’m already under contract? Like, that’s a good question, and that’s something that somebody would probably enter into Google, and when they do, that’s something that’s going to be presented to them when they’re scrolling.” — MICHAEL STYLES, AGENT, KW NEW ORLEANS

YOUR ACTUAL LIFE IS YOUR CONTENT CALENDAR

The single most common excuse for not posting — “I don’t know what to talk about” — dissolves when you realize the content is already happening around you. Every transaction, every neighborhood walk, every event on the calendar is raw material.

Michael described his process plainly: he has two listings in the Bywater, a videographer booked for two to three hours on a Friday, and a short list of what is actually happening in the neighborhood. The Old Navy building under construction nearby became a story. The Crescent City Classic at the end of the month became another. His friend Caleb running a team at the race became an interview opportunity. None of it required a content strategist or a production budget — just the discipline to look at what was already on the schedule.

Brittany’s version of the same principle extends to agents who do not yet have listings in their target area. Her advice: go stand in front of a home that is for sale, say what you love about it, then walk to your favorite café and show people what it actually feels like to live there. Out-of-town buyers are making decisions about neighborhoods they have never walked. That kind of local, personal content fills a real gap.

THE MULTI-PLATFORM PLAYBOOK

Gary Vaynerchuk’s instruction to post on at least seven platforms sounds paralyzing until you see how Philip has approached it: build one piece of core content, then let it multiply.

Philip starts with a blog post on Reddit, where he has found the most traction. That blog becomes the script for a video. The video becomes a Substack email. One idea, three formats, one workload. He keeps a monthly content schedule so the blog topics are planned in advance and the rest flows from there. The Edits app on Instagram — which Brittany also endorses as the most approachable tool for anyone who considers themselves technologically challenged — handles the video production side without requiring professional editing skills.

Philip’s second account, History with Phil, is a deliberate experiment in starting fresh. A new account carries no algorithmic baggage, and a first video on a brand-new profile can reach an audience as large as any established creator’s. His format — opening on ancient Roman or Byzantine history and pivoting mid-video to a local listing — is built around his actual personality: dry humor, a genuine love of history, and the belief that good real estate content can also be a little bit strange.

“I proudly have never bought a lead listing or a buyer because — and I’m always determinedly myself, whether for good or for bad — and in a relationship market like New Orleans, your authenticity is generally rewarded.” — MICHAEL STYLES, AGENT, KW NEW ORLEANS

WHAT AUTHENTICITY ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE

Every agent on the panel landed on the same word independently: authenticity. But they mean something more specific than the word usually implies. They mean posts that include your dog. They mean stories that admit when a transaction was difficult. They mean not doing the trending walk-into-the-house video for the fourth time this month.

Brittany pointed to the example that shifted her own thinking: a woman with 300,000 followers whose entire presence is cooking mediocre food in a moo-moo with her hair in a bun, completely unbothered. No professional lighting, no script, no strategy — just an honest version of herself that hundreds of thousands of people find irresistible because she makes them feel less alone. The takeaway Brittany drew from it was direct: get over yourself and get on the internet.

Michael makes the same point through the lens of New Orleans specifically. This is a city that runs on relationships, and people following a real estate agent want to know whether that agent is someone they can get along with outside of a transaction. His story feed includes his dog, a kickball game, the time his car got broken into — presented with enough self-awareness to make it funny. The goal is not relatability as a tactic. It is just being a real person, which turns out to be the tactic.

“As AI gets bigger and all of that — like you were saying — authenticity is going to be huge. People are going to want to know who you are. And I think … people want to connect. They want to feel like they are seen. They want to feel like somebody else actually cares about what they’re going through. And they want to actually know you.” — BRITTANY PICOLO-RAMOS, AGENT, KW NEW ORLEANS

THE PERMISSION TO JUST START

The session ended where most content conversations begin: the paralysis of getting started. All three agents pushed back on perfectionism in identical terms. Good is better than great. Make it, get it out there. Nobody is rewatching your video to critique your lighting.

Philip’s practical framework for the overwhelmed agent: sit in your car, film three videos back to back, save them, and drip them out one per day. Instagram’s Edits app makes the editing fast enough that production quality is no longer an excuse. When you do hit on something — a post that goes unexpectedly wide — the algorithm is telling you something about your audience. Lean into it, unless you actively do not want to be known for that thing.

Lauren Doussan framed the urgency in terms that reached back to the office’s larger argument about technology adoption: the agents who figured out websites in 1999 built durable advantages. The agents building their content presence now, while AI is still in its infrastructure phase and organic reach is still largely free, are in the same position. The window is open. It will not stay open at the same cost.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Brittany, Michael, and Philip each arrived at the same conclusion from three different directions: the agents who will win in the AI-mediated, interest-algorithm era are the ones who have built a documented public presence — not polished, not expensive, but consistent and real. ChatGPT is already indexing MLS data from the major portals, and it will answer your clients’ questions by surfacing the agents whose content has established topical authority. The Bywater walkthrough, the first-time buyer FAQ video, the cross-collaboration with your lender — all of it is feeding a professional record that AI will use to recommend you, or not. Post more. Post everywhere. Post as yourself. The cost of starting today is one video filmed in a parked car.

About this series. KW New Orleans hosts regular conversations with the people shaping how real estate gets done in this city — agents, operators, and leaders working at the edge of what’s changing. These are the conversations that happen in the rooms most people don’t get invited into.

Disclaimer: This article is provided for general informational purposes only and reflects a summary of a public conversation. It is not legal advice, public safety guidance, or a guarantee of outcomes. Laws, policies, and crime trends can change, and individual situations vary. For questions about legal matters, consult a licensed attorney. For real estate questions, consult a licensed real estate broker, and verify any neighborhood-specific concerns through appropriate official sources.

This article was originally published on our website, which can be accessed here.

WHY IT MATTERS

If you’ve been feeling like the world is throwing an endless stream of new circumstances at you—market shifts, competing demands, the fog of a calendar that seems full but somehow doesn’t produce the results you want—you’re not alone. But according to one of the sharpest coaches working in real estate today, the problem isn’t the world. It’s the absence of a real strategy.

Kristen Cronin is a coach with KW MAPS Coaching, a former Team Leader of three market centers, and a co-founder of a coaching practice that works across industries beyond real estate. She stopped by KW New Orleans to talk with Operating Principal Jeffrey Doussan about what separates agents who thrive from those who stay stuck—and the answer she kept coming back to had nothing to do with market conditions.

Kristen Cronin

COACH — KW MAPS COACHING

Kristen Cronin didn’t arrive at coaching from a straight line. She led not one, not two, but three KW market centers as Team Leader before stepping into a coaching role that now spans real estate, land, wellness, and business-to-business clients across the country. She’s an educator for KW Land and KW Wellness—two divisions that might seem unrelated until you hear her explain how a GIS map and a listing appointment are solved by the exact same strategic framework. She and her partner split the work the way she teaches agents to split their lead generation: he’s property-driven, she’s people-driven, and together they’ve used that approach to get ahead of development deals before most agents even know a market is moving. The thing that sticks with you after talking to Kristen isn’t a tactic—it’s the uncomfortable realization that you already know what you need to do, and she’s just going to make you admit why you haven’t done it.

THE STATE OF PLAY

Before she got into frameworks and entry points, Cronin set the stage with a diagnosis. The restlessness agents are feeling right now isn’t a New Orleans problem, a market-cycle problem, or a Jazz Fest distraction problem. It’s a human condition—and it’s being made worse by a specific set of defaults most agents don’t realize they’re running.

1. Prescribed processes feel like productivity. Running a checklist of standard activities can look like high function—and feel like a full day—without moving the needle on actual outcomes. Cronin calls this being stuck in prescriptive mode: doing the thing because it’s the thing, not because it produces what you want.

2. Reactive cycles are the default setting. Most agents, she argues, are making decisions after something has already happened—adjusting on the fly rather than getting ahead of the variables. The market changes, a client goes sideways, a deal falls through—and then they respond. Strategy means reversing that sequence.

3. Mismatched communication kills conversion. Cronin told an agent on a coaching call that same morning: “You’re giving information in listing appointments in the way that you process it. Your clients do not process it that way.” Speaking your own language to someone who processes differently is why agreements don’t get signed.

4. Visibility gaps, not lead shortages. “You don’t have a lead problem,” Cronin said plainly. “You have a visibility problem.” Most agents have thousands of contacts in their phones and are dramatically underworking the relationships already in front of them.

“You can either proactively get ahead of those things and have a strategic plan that changes with the adaption of whatever’s changing in your market around you or in your life around you. It’s a human condition. It happens in all industries. It happens to all people, so it’s not unique. But the problem is we aren’t dealing with it strategically.”

— KRISTEN CRONIN, COACH, KW MAPS COACHING

OPPORTUNITY ENGINEERING

Cronin’s term for intentional, proactive business development is opportunity engineering—and it starts with a question most agents skip entirely: what do I actually want out of this? Not the transaction. Not the commission. The specific outcome, mapped backward into daily activities.

The framework she uses involves layering variables: what’s the timing, who are the relationships, who holds influence, what’s the asset, what’s the environment? Running through those questions before acting—rather than defaulting to whatever prescribed process is most familiar—is what separates strategic work from the appearance of it. “It feels like a story problem,” she said. “There’s probably like 50 scenarios off of this moment. Let me figure out what’s the most strategic and proactive, what’s going to produce the outcome that I want.”

She’s quick to acknowledge this takes practice. The payoff is the ability to move fast once you’ve done the slow thinking—running through variables like a system upgrade that eventually becomes second nature.

TWO ENTRY POINTS: PERSON OR PROPERTY

One of the most clarifying ideas Cronin introduced—and one she said almost nobody talks about explicitly—is that every lead-generation approach begins at one of two entry points: you either start with a person and move toward a property, or you start with a property and move toward a person.

The distinction isn’t just academic. It maps directly to personality. Agents who love working FSBOs and expireds are property-entry people: they come in through the asset and find the human on the other side. Agents who thrive on community relationships, referrals, and life-transition conversations are people-entry: they lead with connection and let the property follow. Neither approach is superior—but fighting against your natural entry point is a fast path to burnout and call reluctance.

Cronin and her partner are a real-world example of this in action. He monitors city and county GIS data, tracks development pipelines, and spots underutilized land before anyone else is looking—classic property-entry thinking. She builds the people relationships. Together, they’ve used that division to secure a development deal for over 200 homes in a market about to receive a significant wave of new industry. The point she drove home: both sides of that deal were engineered, not stumbled into.

“You don’t have a lead problem. You have a visibility problem, most likely, and you also have a strategy problem.”

— KRISTEN CRONIN, COACH, KW MAPS COACHING

DATABASE, SEGMENTATION & THE MESSAGE PROBLEM

A phone full of contacts is not a database strategy. Cronin is direct about this: if your database isn’t segmented into meaningful buckets, you’re sending the same message to people with completely different needs—and wondering why nothing converts.

She breaks a working database into three layers: now business (people actively in a transaction or close to one), next business (people in the pipeline with a horizon of months), and network influence business (the relationships who will refer and amplify). Each layer requires a different message, a different frequency, and a different value proposition. Blanketing all three with the same email or text is the equivalent of giving your listing presentation the same way to every client regardless of how they think.

This is where business-to-business relationships become a major lever. Cronin walked through the math of a client’s journey: from first contact through closing and beyond, there are potentially 150 or more business categories that touch that same client for different reasons. Mortgage, title, inspection, storage, interior design, landscaping, childcare—anyone who shares your client is a potential referral partner. The strategic move is to map that ecosystem, identify who has your clients, and build intentional relationships with those businesses rather than waiting for referrals to arrive organically.

LEVERAGE, TIME AUDITS & THE DOLLAR-PER-HOUR REALITY

Cronin draws a hard line between work that belongs on your plate and work that doesn’t. The exercise she returns to repeatedly: draw a line down a piece of paper, put your name on the left, put everything else on the right, and place only the activities that represent your highest-and-best use on the left side. Everything else gets delegated, systematized, or handed to technology.

Leverage, she explains, takes three forms: a person, a technology, or a system and process. Inserting any one of them into the right spot can recapture hours that are currently being spent on tasks that pay you far less than your target income requires. The math is unforgiving—if you’re spending your hours on $15-per-hour administrative work, that’s effectively the wage you’re paying yourself for that time, regardless of what your commission split looks like on paper.

She also raised the opposite problem: agents who aren’t working enough hours to match their income expectations. A coaching client she worked with recently revealed they were putting in seven hours—for the week. “You literally have less than a part time job,” she told them, “and that’s why your bank account reflects that.” Her recommendation is a time-tracking audit: log actual hours against actual activities for a week, then let the numbers tell you the story.

“Stop thinking in transactions. Start thinking in networks.”

— JEFFREY DOUSSAN, OPERATING PRINCIPAL, KW NEW ORLEANS

THE 30-DAY COMMITMENT & WHERE TO START

Cronin closed with a challenge that’s intentionally simple, because she’s seen what happens when agents try to run ten strategies at once: nothing grows. The directive is to pick one approach, commit to it for at least 30 days without deviation, and let it produce data before changing anything.

The starting actions are concrete. Identify 200 VIP contacts from your database. Assign every one of them to a segment. Decide your entry point—person or property—based on where you naturally operate. Then initiate ten conversations this week. Not automated messages, not bulk texts, not a newsletter blast—actual conversations, shaped by what you know about each person and what you actually want from the interaction.

She’s also clear that a schedule is not a strategy. DTD2—the Keller Williams “Daily Two” contact framework—is a useful structure, but it doesn’t tell you who to call, what to say, or how to match the message to the moment. That’s the strategy layer, and it has to be built separately, revisited quarterly, and run with enough consistency to actually generate signal.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Kristen Cronin’s core argument is that most agents aren’t under-working—they’re misallocating. The busyness is real, but it’s built from prescribed processes and reactive habits that feel productive without engineering specific outcomes. Her fix isn’t a new script or a shinier CRM: it’s identifying your natural entry point (person or property), segmenting your database into now, next, and network layers, and running one focused strategy for 30 days before touching anything else. The agents who do the slow strategic thinking first—variables, timing, relationships, intent—are the ones who stop chasing leads they don’t have and start harvesting the business already sitting inside the networks they’ve built. That shift, Cronin would say, is entirely a choice.

About this series. KW New Orleans hosts regular conversations with the leaders shaping our city — developers, architects, investors, and operators building the New Orleans of tomorrow. These are the conversations that happen in the rooms most people don’t get invited into.

Disclaimer: This article is provided for general informational purposes only and reflects a summary of a public conversation. It is not legal advice, public safety guidance, or a guarantee of outcomes. Laws, policies, and crime trends can change, and individual situations vary. For questions about legal matters, consult a licensed attorney. For real estate questions, consult a licensed real estate broker, and verify any neighborhood-specific concerns through appropriate official sources.

This article was originally published on our website, which can be accessed here.

WHY IT MATTERS

For decades, three half-million-square-foot industrial buildings sat fenced off on the Bywater riverfront — assembled tanks during World War I, housed a thousand naval workers after that, and then slowly became one of the most visible symbols of post-Katrina stagnation in the city. The gates are finally coming down.

Brian Gibbs, developer and principal of Brian Gibbs Development, LLC, stepped into a project that another developer had spent years trying to unlock — and that was heading back to the city the day a $20 million state grant came through. What followed was the most complex financing stack ever assembled for affordable housing in Louisiana: $197 million, 294 units, federal and state tax credits, a HUD loan, city and state grants, and a California partner who added a rooftop pool. Construction started the day after closing.

Brian Gibbs

DEVELOPER & PRINCIPAL — BRIAN GIBBS DEVELOPMENT, LLC

Gibbs grew up in the construction business in New Orleans, sweeping job sites before he could drive. After graduating from Tulane, he headed to New York to work in construction — then came back to the city and bought a derelict orphanage on Magazine Street in 1996. He renovated it into 28 apartments, named it the Orphanage Apartments, and has been doing that kind of thing ever since. His biggest swing before the NSA Bywater project was 930 Poydras, a 250-unit, 21-story high-rise built after Katrina using Go Zone bonus depreciation and New Markets Tax Credits. He had never done a Low Income Housing Tax Credit project before this one. He took the NSA assignment because the estate of the original developer was about to hand the keys back to the city — and he couldn’t let that happen. The man who once swept floors on job sites is now stewarding the largest LIHTC deal in Louisiana history, and he still talks about the project the way someone does when they genuinely love a city.

THE STATE OF PLAY

The former Naval Support Activity (NSA) base in the Bywater is a 23-acre campus of three buildings, each roughly 600 feet long and 150 feet deep — a half million square feet per structure. Here is where the project stands.

1. Financing closed December 11, 2024. The $197 million capital stack includes a HUD loan, federal and state Low Income Housing Tax Credits, historic tax credits, bridge loans, a $20 million CDBG grant from the state, and city contributions. The HUD loan itself is only $32 million — the credits do the heavy lifting to keep the mortgage manageable and rents capped.

2. Broadmoor Construction holds a $124 million construction contract and broke ground immediately after closing. The first phase — 294 units across the first two buildings, including a rooftop pool and lobby finishes comparable to a hotel — is targeted for completion in December 2027.

3. Lincoln Avenue Communities, the largest LIHTC developer in the nation and based in Santa Monica, came on as Gibbs’s equity partner. They previously completed the Tivoli senior housing project at the former Lee Circle, which filled in three months and now carries a three-year waiting list.

4. New Lab — a clean fuel commercialization hub modeled on innovation campuses in Detroit and New York City — has broken ground on a new construction building on the campus. The state and city brought New Lab to Gibbs; he gave them three acres of land rent-free in exchange for their full buildout investment.

“It ended up being the largest Low Income Housing Tax Credit project in the history of the state of Louisiana. It’s $197 million this first phase, it’s 294 units. There’s historic tax credits, federal and state low income tax credits. The city’s coughed up money.”

— BRIAN GIBBS, DEVELOPER & PRINCIPAL, BRIAN GIBBS DEVELOPMENT, LLC

HOW THE DEAL WAS BORN

The project’s origin story involves a death, a car accident, and an unlikely inheritance. Joe Yeager— hotelier, contractor, and real estate operator — had held the 99-year lease on the NSA site from the city for years, working to unlock the financing needed to make the numbers work. He had been waiting on a state gap-funding award when he was struck by a car on the North Shore in the summer of 2024.

Yeager died on or around June 25, 2024. On July 3 — eight days later — the state announced its CDBGawards, and his estate was on the list for $20 million. His estate contacted Gibbs, who had been advising on the HUD loan application, and asked him to take the project over. The alternative was returning the keys to the city. Gibbs said yes, having never previously completed a LIHTC deal.

THE THIRD BUILDING & THE HUB VISION

The first two buildings are under construction. The third — the one closest to the Industrial Canal— is a different problem. The city contributed $6 million to stabilize its exterior: windows, paint, and a building envelope, essentially a movie-set shell while a long-term plan takes shape. Inside, it needs environmental remediation.

Louisiana Economic Development awarded the project Fast Sites dollars — $7 million to clean out the building’s interior. Gibbs says it was the only project in New Orleans to receive a Fast Sites award in that round. The working vision for the space is a jobs-creation hub that graduates companies out of New Labinto the larger structure, with ground-floor retail, art galleries, a vo-tech school, and destination tenants curated to draw the neighborhood in the way Magazine Street draws people to meander.

The model Gibbs keeps returning to is Industry City in New York — a campus where the draw is the aggregation of things to do, not any single anchor. He is also in conversations about a grocery store and has had an inquiry from Waymo. The lease from the city runs for 99 years at $150,000 a year for the entire campus.

“As a developer, I’m like a victim of the food chain, so to speak, like I’m the low man on the totem pole. I can’t force the incomes of people to go higher so they can pay more rent or buy a bigger house. But this is our opportunity to get move up the food chain and create jobs.”

— BRIAN GIBBS, DEVELOPER & PRINCIPAL, BRIAN GIBBS DEVELOPMENT, LLC

OPENING 20 ACRES TO THE BYWATER

Since 1918, the entire NSA campus has been fenced off from the surrounding neighborhood. Gibbs intends to change that completely. The site sits at what locals call “the End of the World” — the point where the Industrial Canal meets the Mississippi River — and he describes it as feeling like Audubon Park’s fly, just on the other end of the city.

He has met with Audubon’s Mike Sawaya and Ron Foreman about programming the riverfront edge as a low-touch park: native plants, a spine running along the canal, parking on both sides, and a pedestrian connection to Crescent Park, which is roughly 500 yards away. An economic development district would generate sales tax revenue to sustain the park without requiring the zoo or a nonprofit to absorb operating losses. The 880-car parking structure — with roughly 400 to 500 spaces reserved for residents and the balance open to the public — would anchor access for visitors arriving by car, while bike and pedestrian paths serve those coming from the neighborhood.

WHAT LIHTC ACTUALLY MEANS FOR RESIDENTS

The term “affordable housing” carries a lot of baggage. Gibbs is direct about what this project actually delivers. All 294 units in the first phase are income-restricted — not a mix with market-rate units on top. The income range runs from 30% to 80% of Area Median Income (AMI), using income averaging across the project. At 80% AMI in New Orleans, the qualifying income is roughly $44,000 a year for an individual household.

Rents are structured so that tenants pay approximately 30% of their income toward housing. The affordability commitment runs for 40 years, as do the property tax abatements the city and state have provided. Lincoln Avenue Communities pushed significantly higher finish standards than the original project contemplated — hotel-quality lobby, rooftop swimming pool and cabana — specifically to attract working residents who have options. Their comparable project, the Tivoli at the former Lee Circle, filled in three months and has a three-year waiting list. That is the benchmark Gibbs is building toward.

“You got to make the product so nice that people want to live there. And that’s how, like, that’s where the teachers and folks like that get in there, and it’s actually helps them as they’re moving along.”

— BRIAN GIBBS, DEVELOPER & PRINCIPAL, BRIAN GIBBS DEVELOPMENT, LLC

THE RIVER DISTRICT CONNECTION

The NSA Bywater project does not exist in isolation. Across town, the River District — the stretch running from the power plant at Market Street through the convention center — has just topped out its first new office building in decades. Shell is moving 700 employees into roughly 150,000 square feet there, with an $80 million core-and-shell cost and a $30 million tenant buildout. The Gulf of America deep-water group is relocating its headquarters to that building, led by Colette Hurst, a New Orleans native who was just named head of Shell USA — the first time that role will be based in this city.

Gibbs is a co-developer on the River District project alongside Laura Sella and the broader development team. The two projects — one at the upriver edge of downtown, one at the downriver edge of the Bywater — represent the largest simultaneous bets on New Orleans’ urban core in a generation.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Brian Gibbs closed a $197 million deal he had no business being in — by his own admission, he had never done a LIHTC project before — and broke ground the next day. The NSA Bywater campus will add 294 high-finish affordable units, a clean energy innovation hub, 20 newly public riverfront acres, and an 880-space parking structure to a neighborhood that has been land-locked by a fenced industrial ruin since 1918. The financing is done, Broadmoor is on site, and the target is December 2027. What happens in the third building — half a million square feet, remediated and ready — is the next decision that will define what the Bywater becomes.

About this series. KW New Orleans hosts regular conversations with the leaders shaping our city — developers, architects, investors, and operators building the New Orleans of tomorrow. These are the conversations that happen in the rooms most people don’t get invited into.

Disclaimer: This article is provided for general informational purposes only and reflects a summary of a public conversation. It is not legal advice, public safety guidance, or a guarantee of outcomes. Laws, policies, and crime trends can change, and individual situations vary. For questions about legal matters, consult a licensed attorney. For real estate questions, consult a licensed real estate broker, and verify any neighborhood-specific concerns through appropriate official sources.

This article was originally published on our website, which can be accessed here.

WHY IT MATTERS

The office you walk your clients into is doing sales work before you say a word. That’s not a metaphor—it’s architecture. And the team at KW New Orleans learned it firsthand when they handed the keys to a mid-century modernist building full of cubicles to an interior designer who understood both the building’s bones and the brokerage’s soul.

Nomita Joshi-Gupta joined the KW New Orleans weekly meeting to walk agents through the decisions behind the office’s renovation—and why nearly every principle she applied to this space translates directly to how agents should think about the homes they sell.

Nomita Joshi-Gupta

PRINCIPAL — NOMITA JOSHI INTERIOR DESIGN | COMMISSIONER — CITY OF NEW ORLEANS CITY PLANNING COMMISSION

Nomita trained as an architect in India, where her father ran his own practice and fully expected her to join it one day. She didn’t—she settled in New Orleans instead, worked in urban planning at the City Planning Commission, and built a career in preservation architecture. Then Hurricane Katrina rewrote her plans again: the damage to her own home pulled her toward interior design, and she never looked back. She spent years working under the umbrella of Sprucebefore launching Nomita Joshi Interior Design after COVID—naming the firm after her father as a quiet tribute to the legacy she chose to honor from across an ocean. Today she sits on the board of the Preservation Resource Center, serves as a City Planning Commissioner, and draws creative inspiration from couture runway shows and vintage cinema in equal measure. She is someone who reads the character of a building the way a novelist reads a room.

THE STATE OF PLAY

When Nomita first walked into the KW New Orleans building on River Road, she saw something other designers missed: the building wasn’t a problem to fix—it was a vocabulary to translate. Here is what that approach looked like in practice.

1. Mid-century modernism was already in the building’s DNA. Constructed by engineers in the 1980s, the structure had a clean modernist logic that most proposals ignored. Nomita borrowed its language—open volumes, natural materials, a restrained palette of terrazzo, walnut, and earth tones—rather than imposing a style from outside.

2. Compression and expansion became the organizing principle. Guests enter through a lower, narrower corridor—a compressed space that feels intimate and welcoming—before opening into the grand main room. The same journey repeats on the way to the kitchen. This is a defining feature of successful mid-century homes, and it works the same way in a brokerage.

3. Spruce was preserved rather than replaced. Rather than ripping out the existing carpet, Nomita identified it as acoustically functional and visually neutral—freeing the budget for interventions with genuine visual impact, like the fluted stone reception desk and the handwoven lattice wall that became the room’s signature element.

4. “Buncha”—the old name for New Orleans, meaning a culture of many tongues—guided the cultural identity of the space. Rather than layering on explicit New Orleans iconography, Nomita built a room that feels rooted without being literal, drawing on the city’s nature as a convergence of many traditions.

“You wanted to transform it into a place where people felt welcome. Your clients felt like you were coming to maybe like a boutique hotel, or like a living room, or also a place which had cultural identity from many places, but not necessarily rooted in one, because New Orleans is kind of like a culture of many.”

— NOMITA JOSHI-GUPTA, PRINCIPAL, NOMITA JOSHI INTERIOR DESIGN

THE LATTICE WALL & THE ART OF ITERATION

The wall behind the main meeting space—the one everyone notices first—was not the result of a single inspired decision. It went through multiple full iterations before the final version existed. That process is itself the lesson.

The original vision was a stylized house form with a slot window—architectural without being obvious. The platform beside it was built, torn down, and rebuilt in a different location. At one point there were round steps. Through all of it, Nomita’s guiding principle was to suggest the idea of home without illustrating it. The mid-century lattice that finally resolved the wall drew from an image the clients had brought back from Colorado—an open-close indoor-outdoor feeling that Lauren Doussan ultimately realized by hand, weaving the entire structure herself with a newborn in a carrier on the floor. Nomita looked at it and said: that’s it. The American Society of Interior Designers South Central chapter later awarded the project a silver award in the small commercial category.

COLOR AS PSYCHOLOGY, NOT DECORATION

Nomita makes a clean distinction between color as aesthetic choice and color as psychological environment—and argues that most people default to white precisely because it protects them from exposure.

When working with clients on color, she starts with what they’re drawn to and—more importantly—what they actively dislike. Color palettes are then built to guide movement through a home, functioning the same way compression and expansion do spatially: each color is experienced in relationship to the one beside it, not in isolation. For smaller New Orleans doubles where architectural compression is hard to achieve structurally, color and wallpaper become the primary tools for creating that same sense of coziness or openness.

Her advice to agents whose clients are preparing to sell a boldly colored home: resist the impulse to whitewash everything. Edit instead. Remove visual clutter, create coherence, and let the intentionality of the choices do the selling. The home with a legible design story moves faster than the one scrubbed into neutrality for a hypothetical buyer who may not exist.

“I was watching a video the other day about some designer who said, don’t design your home for someone else. Design it for yourself. Design it for yourself. And then the buyers will come. They’ll buy it.”

— NOMITA JOSHI-GUPTA, PRINCIPAL, NOMITA JOSHI INTERIOR DESIGN

THE STORY A HOUSE TELLS

One of Nomita’s most direct challenges to the agents in the room: every house has a story, and it’s the agent’s job to know it and tell it.

When she approaches a new project, she builds a muse and a narrative before she touches a material: who is the person walking through this space? What does this house want to be? She applied that same lens to 1914 Esplanade Avenue , a home on Bayou Road that her firm designed and that is now on the Preservation Resource Center’s Spring Tour (May 9–10). The house is the last documented work of architect Henry Howard, built in 1914, and known as the Tête House—notable for a dramatic staircase built to a specific scale for its original occupant. The clients pushed for bold color throughout, and Nomita pushed back harder. The result will be open top to bottom for tour visitors.

For agents, the application is immediate: being able to reference a home like this one—to say I walked through one of the most colorful houses on Bayou Road last spring, and here’s what was possible—is the difference between describing a neighborhood and selling a dream. Robert Cannon, a noted New Orleans artist whose home is on the cover of the PRC print, is also featured in the tour.

LIVING PLANTS & THE TEXTURE NO OBJECT CAN REPLICATE

Every plant in the KW New Orleans office is real, and that was not an accident.

Nomita points to Mexico City—one of the most densely populated cities on earth—as a model: nearly every establishment there integrates living plants at a scale that feels like walking into a greenhouse. The effect is calm, not chaos. Living plants provide a texture and luminosity that no object or artificial alternative can produce, and they create a relationship between the occupant and the natural world that quietly shifts how a space feels to be inside of it. In an office people come to every day, or a home someone is trying to imagine themselves living in, that matters.

“Every home is kind of like a mirror of that person. You know what they’re like? I’m here as a designer to put that person’s vision together. But the end of it, it’s a mirror to them. Their lifestyle and their soul a little bit.”

— NOMITA JOSHI-GUPTA, PRINCIPAL, NOMITA JOSHI INTERIOR DESIGN

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR AGENTS

The KW New Orleans office is home court advantage—and now agents know exactly why it works and how to talk about it.

Every conference room, every corridor transition, every fixture was argued over, built twice, and chosen deliberately. Being able to articulate that to a client—to walk them through a space and explain the compression before the kitchen, the reason the carpet stayed, why the ceiling troughs glow at night—is the same skill that sells homes. Design literacy is a competitive edge. Knowing a project like 1914 Esplanade, knowing a designer like Nomita, knowing the story of the Tête House: these are the details that separate agents who describe properties from agents who make people want to live inside of them.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Nomita Joshi-Gupta turned a cubicle farm into an award-winning workspace by refusing to be literal about what an office—or a home—is supposed to look like. She reads buildings the way good agents should read neighborhoods: for what’s already there, what story it wants to tell, and who belongs inside it. Her framework of compression and expansion, color as therapy, and design as a mirror of the soul isn’t abstract theory—it’s a practical tool for anyone who walks clients through spaces for a living. As bold color continues to move New Orleans homes faster than neutral palettes, and as the Preservation Resource Center Spring Tour opens the Tête House to the public this May, agents who understand the language of intentional design will have something to say that their competition doesn’t.

About this series. KW New Orleans hosts regular conversations with the leaders shaping our city — developers, architects, investors, and operators building the New Orleans of tomorrow. These are the conversations that happen in the rooms most people don’t get invited into.

Disclaimer: This article is provided for general informational purposes only and reflects a summary of a public conversation. It is not legal advice, public safety guidance, or a guarantee of outcomes. Laws, policies, and crime trends can change, and individual situations vary. For questions about legal matters, consult a licensed attorney. For real estate questions, consult a licensed real estate broker, and verify any neighborhood-specific concerns through appropriate official sources.

This article was originally published on our website, which can be accessed here.

WHY IT MATTERS

The loneliness epidemic is literally killing American workers, and most leaders are responding with the wrong medicine. While organizations double down on productivity metrics and remote mandates, employees are withering from disconnection at rates that rival smoking addiction.

Michelle Johnston has spent years studying what separates thriving teams from failing ones, and her research points to a counter-intuitive truth: the path to better performance runs through deeper human connection, not more efficient systems.

Michelle Johnston
DISTINGUISHED PROFESSOR — LOYOLA UNIVERSITY NEW ORLEANS

At 22, Johnston arrived in New Orleans for a consulting gig and immediately gained five pounds, developed uncontrollable hair frizz, and broke out — then called her family to announce she’d fallen in love with the city. When her consulting firm abandoned New Orleans, she pivoted to academia and eventually co-authored a book with Marshall Goldsmith, the world’s number one executive coach. She’s someone who chases audacious goals after a couple glasses of champagne and somehow makes them happen.

THE STATE OF PLAY

Johnston’s latest research reveals a workplace crisis hiding in plain sight. Organizations are optimizing for efficiency while employees suffer from isolation that has measurable health consequences.

1. Dr. Vivek Murthy, former US Surgeon General, documented that one in five Americans feel disconnected, isolated, and lonely — contributing to a 60% increase in early death.

2. Disconnection equivalency: Isolation and loneliness create health impacts equivalent to smoking 16 cigarettes daily, including a 32% increase in cardiovascular disease and stroke.

3. The Great Reprioritization emerged from COVID as experienced workers demanded meaning while Gen Z rejected burnout culture entirely, forcing a fundamental shift in workplace expectations.

4. New Orleans advantage: The city’s festival calendar, front porch culture, and walkable neighborhoods create natural connection points that other metro areas struggle to replicate.

“ One of the biggest failures that I’ve seen is, believe it or not, they’re focused on results, results, results, agenda, agenda, agenda, and they’re not lifting their head up to even say hello.”

— MICHELLE JOHNSTON, DISTINGUISHED PROFESSOR, LOYOLA UNIVERSITY

THE SEVEN SHIFTS FRAMEWORK

Johnston and Marshall Goldsmith identified seven fundamental changes leaders must make to create connection in an increasingly disconnected world. The shifts move from mechanical management to human-centered leadership.

The framework begins with perspective — shifting from “what” tasks need completion to “who” you get to work with each day. This seemingly simple change transforms how leaders approach their calendars, meetings, and energy allocation.

Johnston tested this with a Finnish CEO overseeing $100 million in port terminal construction near New Orleans. His breakthrough came when he stopped waking up focused on task lists and started seeing his calendar as opportunities to influence and connect with specific people.

THE CALENDAR REVOLUTION

Johnston’s most uncomfortable insight centers on a simple truth: show me your calendar, and I’ll show you your priorities. Most leaders discover their most important relationships never appear on their schedules.

This revelation earned Johnston two appearances on NBC News with Kate Snow, who admitted on live television that her most important people weren’t reflected in her daily schedule. The moment illustrated a widespread leadership blind spot.

Johnston learned this lesson painfully when her college daughter confronted her during Christmas break, pointing out that the connection expert had barely seen her own child in two weeks. The incident forced a fundamental rethinking of how intentional scheduling drives relationship outcomes.

“Show me your calendar, and I will show you your priorities, and it might make you really uncomfortable.”

— MICHELLE JOHNSTON, DISTINGUISHED PROFESSOR, LOYOLA UNIVERSITY

THE NEW ORLEANS CONNECTION ADVANTAGE

Johnston argues that New Orleans creates natural connection opportunities that other cities systematically eliminate through suburban sprawl and highway-dependent design.

The city’s front porch culture, festival calendar, and walkable neighborhoods provide built-in relationship infrastructure. Johnston’s daughter, graduating from the University of Georgia, chose to return to New Orleans over Atlanta, Nashville, or Austin specifically because of these connection advantages.

This cultural foundation gives local organizations and real estate professionals distinct advantages in building the relationship-driven teams that Johnston’s research shows drive superior financial performance.

FROM PERFECTIONISM TO HUMANITY

The business world has shifted away from polished perfection toward authentic leadership, but many professionals still struggle to integrate their full selves into their work identity.

Johnston spent years trying to conform to academic expectations, suppressing her naturally enthusiastic teaching style in favor of rigid lecture formats. Her teaching evaluations suffered until she embraced authenticity, leading to improved student engagement and professional satisfaction.

The lesson extends beyond academia: employees and clients increasingly expect leaders to show up as complete humans rather than corporate personas. This shift requires vulnerability that many executives find uncomfortable but necessary.

” The days of this is my professional self, my professional life and my professional calendar. And this is the real me and my real priorities and my real calendar. And they’re separate. Those days are over.”

— MICHELLE JOHNSTON, DISTINGUISHED PROFESSOR, LOYOLA UNIVERSITY

PRACTICAL APPLICATION FOR REAL ESTATE

For real estate professionals, Johnston’s framework translates into shifting perspective from transaction completion to life transformation. Instead of focusing on listing presentations and CMAs, agents can reframe their work around who they get to help reach their next life chapter.

This approach aligns with New Orleans’ natural advantages in storytelling and architectural history. Agents who connect properties to neighborhood narratives and architectural significance create emotional bonds that purely transactional approaches cannot match.

The connection extends to team dynamics within brokerages. Johnston observed that KW New Orleans morning meetings demonstrate effective relationship-building through shared energy, authentic interaction, and collaborative celebration rather than purely business-focused announcements.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Johnston’s research reveals that connection isn’t a soft skill add-on — it’s the foundation that enables trust, innovation, and financial performance. Leaders who continue prioritizing tasks over relationships will watch their teams wither while competitors in cities like New Orleans leverage natural connection advantages to build thriving, profitable organizations. The choice is simple: evolve toward human-centered leadership or lose talent to leaders who understand that people, not processes, drive results.

About this series. KW New Orleans hosts regular conversations with the leaders shaping our city — developers, architects, investors, and operators building the New Orleans of tomorrow. These are the conversations that happen in the rooms most people don’t get invited into.

Disclaimer: This article is provided for general informational purposes only and reflects a summary of a public conversation. It is not legal advice, public safety guidance, or a guarantee of outcomes. Laws, policies, and crime trends can change, and individual situations vary. For questions about legal matters, consult a licensed attorney. For real estate questions, consult a licensed real estate broker, and verify any neighborhood-specific concerns through appropriate official sources.

This article was originally published on our website, which can be accessed here.

Why It Matters

New Orleans is in the middle of one of the most significant reshuffles in its hospitality history. Hotels are trading at deep discounts, brands are pausing new builds, and some of the most iconic properties in the city are quietly changing hands. And yet — the smart money is circling.

To understand what is actually happening, KW New Orleans sat down with Miriam Salas, Partner at Campo Architecture & Interior Design, a firm that has shaped the look of hospitality from New Orleans to Anchorage over the past 40 years. She has designed projects for Marriott, JW, and Sonesta, revived abandoned power plants into luxury hotels, and watched the city rebuild itself after Katrina. When she reads a room, she means it literally.

Miriam Salas

Partner — Campo Architecture & Interior Design

Fulbright Scholar, Tulane University. Began her career designing a JW Marriott in Caracas. Joined Campo after Venezuela’s 2002 national strike stranded her in Miami. Now directs a 20-person national firm with projects from South Beach to Anchorage. Named one of the top 50 most influential women in Louisiana. Year 23 at the firm she was given two months to try.

The State of Play

New Orleans hotels are moving — just not in the way developers imagined three years ago.

1. New development is largely on pause. Tariffs, financing uncertainty, and labor shortages have pushed most owners to renovate existing properties rather than break ground on new ones.

2. Distressed assets are trading fast. Le Pavillon sold for approximately $42 million shortly after a $19 million renovation. The Virgin Hotel, which cost around $80 million to build, was listed for roughly $44 million. These are casualties of over-leveraged pre-COVID pro formas.

3. Proposal requests are picking back up. Salas notes her firm is fielding more RFPs than in months — developers getting their teams in position for when the climate shifts. The engines, she says, are running.

4. Boutique is beating branded. A hotel like the Chloe can charge $800 one week and $1,200 the next. A Courtyard is often capped well under $200. The rate ceiling that comes with a major flag is now a structural disadvantage.

If you have cash, this is the time to buy.— Miriam Salas, Partner, Campo Architecture & Interior Design

The Secret Weapon Most People Overlook

If there is one tool that separates Louisiana hotel development from nearly every other market in the country, it is the state’s historic tax credit program — and very few people outside the industry understand how powerful it is.

Louisiana’s State Commercial Historic Tax Credit currently offers a 25% credit on eligible rehabilitation expenses for qualifying historic buildings (35% in designated rural areas). Stacked on top of the federal 20% Historic Tax Credit, a developer rehabbing a historic income-producing property can access up to 45% of their investment back in tax credits before a single room is booked. Those credits are fully transferable and can be carried forward up to five years under Louisiana law.

A 2025 report by PlaceEconomics found that Louisiana’s historic tax credits generated more than $4.4 billion in investment between 2017 and 2024 — and every $1 in state credits produced $5.38 in direct private investment. Louisiana ranked #2 in the nation for completed federal historic tax credit projects in 2025, trailing only New York.

Key numbers:

1. 45% — Combined state + federal historic tax credits on qualifying Louisiana rehab projects

2. $4.4B — Investment generated by Louisiana historic tax credits, 2017–2024

3. #2 — Louisiana’s national ranking for completed federal HTC projects in 2025

4. 419 — Historic buildings rehabilitated in Louisiana, 2021–2025

Most of our work being historic, it can benefit from historic tax credits — which in some states like Louisiana can be 45% of their investment. That seals the deal, because that’s 45% less they have to ask the bank or their partners for. They have equity up front.— Miriam Salas, Partner, Campo Architecture & Interior Design

Caesars, Four Seasons & The Shakeout

The opening of Caesars New Orleans — a $435 million transformation of the former Harrah’s site — is reshaping the competitive map at the top of the market. The project added 340 new hotel rooms, a Nobu Hotel, and a dining and entertainment complex anchored by Emeril Lagasse and Bobby Flay.

Salas believes Caesars is about to absorb significant market share from the Four Seasons, whose residential condos have struggled at their price points — a pro forma that simply didn’t account for a casino resort of that scale arriving next door. The Nobu Hotel inside Caesars, positioned primarily for high-end guests, is a luxury tier unto itself.

The Design Shift Changing Everything

“It’s not about the transaction, it’s about the experience.” That principle is showing up in blueprints everywhere: reception desks are being hidden or eliminated entirely, and lobbies are now conceived as social destinations first.

Campo’s JW Marriott in Savannah — Salas’s favorite project — converted an abandoned power plant into a luxury hotel: 60–80 foot ceilings, exposed steel trusses, industrial catwalks repurposed as corridors to guest rooms, and a 107-foot dinosaur skeleton hanging from the ceiling. Every rule of luxury hospitality was broken — and the result is something genuinely irreplaceable.

We reused the industrial catwalks as a catwalk to access your room. In a luxury hotel, you want to see a very hands-on carpet in your corridor. Here you have a metal catwalk — but it works in the space.— Miriam Salas, Partner, Campo Architecture & Interior Design. After years of avoiding small projects, Campo has just taken on a 14-room boutique in New Orleans. Their smallest project ever. Salas says it is the right project.

The Play Nobody Is Talking About: Downtown Offices → Hotels

Downtown New Orleans has a quiet occupancy problem. Office towers that claim high occupancy often have large sections of genuinely underutilized space — a reality well known to anyone walking the CBD on a weekday evening.

In San Antonio, Campo compressed office tenants into the lower floors of a 21-story building and converted the rest into a dual-brand hotel — an AC Hotel paired with an Element — sharing back-of-house operations while presenting different products to different guests. New Orleans has no shortage of those buildings.

The Omni Question

The proposed Omni Hotel — slated for the old sugar mill site adjacent to the convention center — is the answer being floated to grow the city’s room count for future Super Bowl bids. The Ernest N. Morial Convention Center needs roughly 10,000 rooms to compete for the largest national conferences. A large-scale hotel at its doorstep is probably necessary, even if the site selection isn’t ideal. The broader riverfront development project remains the more exciting long-term variable; if and when it moves, Salas believes it will fundamentally redraw the city’s map.

The Bottom Line

New Orleans hospitality is not broken — it is repricing. The over-leveraged are selling, the cash-positioned are buying, and historic tax credits are providing meaningful equity in deals that would otherwise not pencil. Boutique and experiential product is outperforming branded prototypes. And a firm that has spent 40 years learning when to pivot is back building in its own backyard. The engines, as Miriam Salas puts it, are running.

About this series. KW New Orleans hosts regular conversations with the leaders shaping our city — developers, architects, investors, and operators building the New Orleans of tomorrow. These are the conversations that happen in the rooms most people don’t get invited into.

Be in the Room Where It Happens

KW New Orleans brings together the sharpest minds in real estate, development, and hospitality. If you’re ready to work alongside people building the city’s future — we’d love to talk.

Disclaimer: This article is for general informational purposes only and is based in part on commentary shared during a KW New Orleans conversation with Miriam Salas, Partner and Studio Director at Campo Architecture & Interior Design. Hotel market conditions, project timelines, financing assumptions, permitting status, and brand strategies may change. Nothing in this article is legal, financial, investment, or development advice. Readers should consult the appropriate licensed professionals and official project sources regarding specific decisions.

This article was originally published on our website, which can be accessed here.