New Orleans, LA

What a New Orleans building lets you film, and what Louisiana lets you say

Most of what a brokerage here wants to publish runs into something local before it gets made. The sidewalk in front of a Quarter storefront belongs to the city and to everybody walking on it. The building is up on piers, so the useful footage is taken from underneath. What an exterior may become is settled by a review process rather than by a rendering. And the explainer content firms borrow from a national library describes a legal system this state does not use. Four constraints, all of them local, and every one of them points at material a national brokerage page has no reason to produce.

A Quarter sidewalk belongs to the city, and to the carriage behind you

A storefront in the French Quarter fronts a narrow public right of way that nobody on your crew controls.

Pedestrians, deliveries, a tour group, a busker and a passing carriage will all be in frame, and none of them will wait for a second take. An exterior shot that depends on a clear sidewalk is a shot that does not exist on those blocks.

Commercial filming on a public right of way inside a historic district is also not something to assume is free. Worth confirming what the city asks for before a crew, a tripod and a light stand turn up rather than after somebody comes over to ask.

The way through is to make the street the subject instead of the obstacle. Foot traffic past a retail door is exactly what an occupier is paying for, so set up across the street, hold one frame, and let the sidewalk fill and empty. A minute of that argues for a retail location better than any description of it.

Interiors then carry the specification work, because the sidewalk will never hold still long enough. The entry, the ceiling height, the rear, the courtyard if there is one, and the service access, which in the Quarter is a real question with a difficult answer.

A raised building has to be filmed from underneath

Much of the older city sits on piers rather than a slab, and the space under the floor is where an occupier's questions actually live.

Pier and beam construction, a high water table and ground that moves put the utilities, the framing and the record of what a building has done over the years into a crawl space rather than behind a wall.

The same construction shapes the interior. The entry is up a stoop, the floors run where they run, and footage that hides both produces a tenant who contradicts it on the first walkthrough. Filming the run of a floor is more honest than a wide lens pretending it is flat.

So light the underside and go in. Pier condition, plumbing runs, ductwork if it is down there, the working height somebody would have under the floor, and where water leaves the site. A build out sends a contractor under that house eventually, and the firm that showed it first is not the firm anybody suspects.

Steps and ramps belong in the same clip. A raised entry is the first thing a retail or medical occupier has to solve, and how much room there is to solve it is visible in a few seconds of video and invisible in every photograph of a front elevation.

The exterior of a protected building is not yours to redraw

In the historic districts what may change on a visible elevation goes through review, which makes a rendering a promise your firm cannot make.

Signage, storefront systems, windows, awnings and paint all sit inside that review on a great many buildings in the Quarter, the Garden District and the older neighborhoods around them. The photograph of the building is close to the photograph a tenant is going to get.

Marketing content walks straight into it. A mocked up sign band over a Creole cottage, or a bright new glass front drawn onto a nineteenth century storefront, publishes an outcome nobody has approved, and the occupier who signed on the strength of it arrives at the problem later with your firm's name attached.

Film what exists and let the timeline be the story instead. What a comparable building down the block looks like now, and roughly how long its owner spent getting there, is something your firm knows from its own work and something no rendering can substitute for.

It also changes what a tenant should hear before signing. The exterior can be the slowest part of an opening, and an occupier who learned that from a brokerage video rather than from a contractor in month three is a tenant who trusts the firm that said it.

Common law lease content is wrong here, not merely vague

Louisiana runs on a civil law system rather than the common law used in every other state, so borrowed educational content misses by more than tone.

The explainer posts most brokerages publish come out of a national template. Lease structure, property rights, what a term in a purchase agreement means and how a sale actually proceeds do not map cleanly onto anything written in Ohio or Texas.

A firm republishing that material gets corrected in public, usually by an attorney who practices here, and the correction outlives the post by a long way.

The opportunity sits in the same spot. Because almost nothing written for a national audience is usable in this state, the plain local version of an ordinary question is unoccupied ground, and a brokerage answering it out of its own transactions is the only place a searcher finds it.

What does not change at the state line, from where to publish to what deserves a budget behind it, is written once at /industries/commercial-real-estate/social-media.

Questions we actually get

Do we need permission to film a storefront from the sidewalk in the Quarter?: Worth confirming with the city, because a broker holding a phone and a crew with a tripod, a light and a second person are not the same thing on a narrow public right of way in a historic district. Plan for people in frame either way. The sidewalk cannot be cleared and should not be, since the foot traffic past that door is a large part of what the space is worth to a retail tenant.
How do we show a raised building without making it look like a problem?: Show all of it. Film the piers with a light, walk the floors as they run, and put the stoop in the frame rather than shooting past it. Occupiers here expect a raised house and are far more suspicious of footage that seems to be avoiding something. The clip that answers the questions a contractor would ask is also the clip that keeps a tenant from discovering the answers on their own two weeks after signing.
Can we publish a rendering of a new storefront on a listing?: Better not to. Changes to a visible exterior in the protected districts go through a review process, so a drawing published as marketing is an outcome nobody has approved yet, and the tenant who signed because of it has a grievance with a name on it. Show the building as it stands, then talk about a comparable building nearby, what its owner ended up with and roughly how long it took. Your own experience is the honest version of that story.
Can we reuse the explainer content our national affiliate produces?: Not the parts that touch law. Louisiana uses a civil law system rather than the common law behind every national template, so a lease or purchase explainer written elsewhere can be wrong here rather than merely imprecise, and somebody local will say so in public. The upside is that the accurate local version of those questions is almost entirely unwritten, which makes it the most durable content a firm in this market can produce.
Do buildings on the Northshore need different content from the ones in the older city?: Different questions entirely, because the construction is different. A slab on grade building in Metairie, Kenner or across the lake in Covington puts the interesting facts outside: parking, drive access, visibility and whether there is land to expand onto. A raised building in the older city puts them underneath and on the front elevation. Filming both the same way produces two videos that each answer half of what somebody wanted to know.

What is different here

Brokerage is licensed and advertising generally has to identify the brokerage rather than only the individual. The more practical constraint is that this industry is bought at submarket grain: a downtown tower and a suburban flex park are different products with different tenants, and content pitched at a whole metro tends to speak to neither.

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Written by KC Thompson, Morgul Marketing.

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