Fraud, Title & Tax Strategy in New Orleans

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.

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