In early March, Tray Gober, a personal injury attorney from Austin, bought a historic Creole cottage on Royal Street in Faubourg Marigny for $1 million. He and his husband had become regular visitors in recent years, so they decided to make New Orleans a second home. Gober’s law firm remains based in Texas, but he now splits his time between the two cities.
“With remote work I can do depositions from Royal Street as well as from Austin,” Gober said.
While home sale prices slumped across most of the metro area during the first half of this year, neighborhoods in the French Quarter, downtown and parts of the Faubourg Marigny and Treme bucked the trend with double-digit price increases.
That’s largely because of out-of-town buyers like Gober, who are scooping up condos and carriage houses for use as second homes.
Residential sale data for the first half of 2023 suggests that more than three quarters of buyers purchasing property downtown, where most of the available housing stock consists of condos in newly constructed or converted older buildings, don’t live in the city of New Orleans. Half are from out of state.
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