Common impediments to real estate closings

One of the challenges in any real estate market is how to make the real estate transaction process affordable, efficient, secure and transparent for an average consumer.

The closing process, prior to and at the closing table, can lead to an array of problems, impediments and potential disasters unless all involved in the transaction are well informed and prepared to close.

Managing your home equity line: Todd Brown used credit to build his real estate business

Todd Brown, 28, stumbled onto his now full-time career of buying, rehabilitating, managing, and selling homes. From age 16 to 19, he worked in his brother's Queens, New York, barbershop, saving money while he lived at home with his mother. He persuaded his mother to let him use $7,500 of his savings and cosign on a used Lexus, but his fiancee and a few months of paying the weighty $900 car note persuaded him to begin looking for a home.

The future of residential: a roundtable on what to expect for the residential real estate market in the capital region

The Baton Rouge Trends Seminar is a great source for data, numbers and charts. But what about the big picture?

Over lunch on May 25, Business Report challenged five local real estate professionals--Scott Bardwell, Teynac Duncan, Darryl Gissel, D. Wesley Moore and Margaret Musso--to pull out the tea leaves and chicken bones and tell us where the residential sector in Baton Rouge is headed. Staff writer Hal Cohen moderated.