Please be advised of an upcoming announcement from Van Eaton & Romero at a press conference on Wednesday, December 12, 2012 at 10:30AM at City Club at River Ranch, Lafayette, LA.
Special guests will be available for interviews and video/photography.
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| Though he acknowledges that "there is something going on" and details will be announced Wednesday morning, Van Eaton & Romero CEO Bill Bacqué says he and fellow firm principals Nancy Van Eaton-Broussard, seated, and Gail Romero "on Thursday and the days beyond that, every day, we are going to be here." |
“There is something going on,” Bacqué acknowledges, though declining to identify the name of the company that will also take part in the announcement. He did, however, confirm that New Orleans-based Latter & Blum is the entity most speculation has been centered upon. That may in part be related to a January 2011 transaction in which Van Eaton & Romero bought the residential division of ERA Stirling Properties’ Lafayette office from Latter & Blum. That agreement occurred simultaneously with Latter & Blum’s purchase of Stirling’s entire residential division, which included operations in Baton Rouge and New Orleans.
Latter & Blum, which currently has only a commercial property management office in Lafayette, operates in Louisiana and Mississippi and includes residential, relocation and commercial divisions and a property management division; it offers insurance and financing services as well, according to its website. The company also owns CJ Brown Realtors in Baton Rouge and Noles-Frye in Alexandria.
Calls placed to the Lafayette Latter & Blum office and the company's marketing department in New Orleans were not immediately returned.
Latter & Blum and VER's dealings with each other actually date back almost a decade, according to Bacqué. “[In] 2003 or 2004, we exchanged our residential property management division for a Latter & Blum Lafayette residential sales office. At that time they actually had a small presence in the Lafayette housing market. We wanted to get out of the property management business, and they were not satisfied with the performance of their residential sales operation. It was a good trade for all parties,” he says.
Bacqué couched the Wednesday press conference as more of an announcement about the company’s strategy for 2013 and beyond, saying it will unveil “significant technological changes, relocation enhancements and other strategic announcements to help us define and maintain our dominance as a real estate company going into the future.”
“I can tell you, Nancy [Van Eaton-Broussard], Gail [Romero] and I on Thursday and the days beyond that, every day, we are going to be here,” Bacqué continues.
Van Eaton-Broussard and Romero founded the firm in 1977; Bacqué, now 61, joined them in 1990.
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MAY 24 Jarvis DeBerry posts here about the redonkulus rhetoric that would have us believe NOLA is a safe city with a murder problem. Maybe the city's crime stats don't compare with its murder stats because you can't manipulate a murder, he says: a dead body's a dead body. It just doesn't make sense, he says, and his readers agree: a poll asks if they believe the city is safe, and more than 90 percent say no.
MAY 24 Jindal administration officials announced Thursday that the privatization of public health care is going to cost a lot more than they budgeted for, the Advocate reports here. "I'm so surprised," said no one. Anywhere. The cost they're projecting now is more than $1 billion - a lot more than the $626 million budgeted for it. And, it's more than it cost the state to operate those hospitals. So why are we doing this again?
MAY 24 Blogger CB Forgotston ridicules the recent PR campaign by the state GOP in the wake of a legislative auditor's request to both major parties. The GOP (apparently unaware that the Dems got the same request) started yammering about being targeted because it had "killed" a tax increase. CB finds that laughable, but it's also pretty funny that the GOP was comparing this episode to the IRS scandal (Because the President has so much to do with our state auditor. Right?).
MAY 24 Politico details some recent fund-raising efforts by Sen. David Vitter, which have raised the question of his future political plans. This time, it is a $5,000 per head "bayou weekend" that includes "Cajun cooking" and an all-caps "alligator hunt," the story reports. Funds raised go to a super PAC that can spend money to support Vitter in federal or state races, the story points out.
MAY 24 The pink building on Royal in the quarter was sold at a sheriff's sale Thursday, this Picayune story reports. An injunction that would have halted the sale wasn't enforced because the family failed to post a $150,000 bond, the story reports. So the owner of the mortgages on the building bought it, for nearly $7 million. Now the feuding family will have to negotiate with that company to get a lease on the building that has housed their business for close to 60 years.
MAY 23 This post in Louisiana Voice tells us about a bill by a Winnsboro lege that would require all public high school students to take at least one Course Choice online class in order to graduate. (What?) Blogger Tom Aswell says it's a monument to "waste and corruption," especially in light of the problems he's exposed with the program in recent weeks. Idaho had a similar program, but voters removed it by a 2-1 margin, Aswell says.
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