Selling Houses

East Baton Rouge Parish

Sell your house in Baton Rouge

Baton Rouge and East Baton Rouge Parish run one consolidated government, so the department that issues a permit inside the city issues it in the unincorporated parish too. What that office does not hold is split three ways: the assessor keeps the assessment and the homestead exemption, the clerk of court keeps the conveyance and mortgage records, and the sheriff collects the tax bill. The flood map in force across the parish took effect on June 19, 2012, four years before the August 2016 flood.

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What does a consolidated city-parish government mean when you sell?

It means one set of offices, with one exception that catches people. The city and the parish were unified into a single executive under a Mayor-President and one council, and the City-Parish page describes the separateness of the two as existing more in bookkeeping than in operations. Permits, planning and inspections run through the same department whether the address is inside the city limits or in the unincorporated parish.

The exception is the other municipalities. Baker, Central, Zachary and St. George are separate cities inside East Baton Rouge Parish, each with its own government, and the Plan of Government requires the parish to allocate a share of industrial-area tax revenue to Baton Rouge, Zachary, Central and Baker. A Central or a Zachary address is a parish address for the assessor and the clerk, and it is not a Baton Rouge address for permits.

Where are the records on a Baton Rouge house held?

In three offices, none of which is the permit office. The assessor at 222 St. Louis Street holds the assessment, the parcel record and the homestead exemption. The clerk of court holds the recorded acts, in two separate sets: conveyance records indexed by vendee and vendor, and mortgage records indexed by mortgagee and mortgagor. The sheriff holds the tax account.

Every notarial act recorded with the clerk gets an original and bundle number and a dated, timed recordation stamp, and certified copies are available on request. That is what a closing attorney pulls on your property, and it is the same set a buyer's attorney will read for a judgment, a lien or an old mortgage that was never cancelled.

Is my house in a flood zone if it did not take water in 2016?

Possibly, and the reverse is also true, because the map and the event are four years apart. FEMA's community status book shows East Baton Rouge Parish with a current effective map date of June 19, 2012. The National Weather Service recorded 20 to 30 inches of rain over parts of southeast Louisiana from August 11 through 13, 2016, with record flooding in the Amite and Comite river basin and East Baton Rouge among the parishes most widely affected.

So a house that flooded in 2016 can still sit outside the special flood hazard area on the map a lender reads. Pull the address on the FEMA Map Service Center, find any elevation certificate you were given, and keep the insurance declarations page and any claim paperwork together. The state's mandatory disclosure form asks about water intrusion, flood zone classification and prior claims by name.

What does the homestead exemption do to the tax figure a buyer sees?

It lowers yours and not theirs. Louisiana allows one homestead exemption per person, up to 75,000 dollars of value on the home you actually occupy, and it is filed with the parish assessor rather than attached to the property. Application in East Baton Rouge is made in person at the main office or at the Coursey or Central branch.

The assessor's own rule is that an owner does not reapply each year unless there has been a change in the title of the property. A sale is a change in title. When a buyer asks what the taxes will be, the number on your bill reflects an exemption they do not yet have, and the honest answer says so.

Neighborhoods in Baton Rouge

  • Spanish Town. One of only two local historic overlay districts in the parish, carried in the City-Parish GIS as LHOD2. It was laid out in 1805 and listed on the National Register on August 31, 1978, and the local overlay is what triggers design review on exterior work.
  • Drehr Place. The parish's other local overlay, LHOD1, with a designation report prepared by the Office of the Planning Commission in October 2005. It was listed on the National Register on November 13, 1997, and Colonial Revival and Craftsman bungalow houses appear in the greatest numbers.
  • Beauregard Town. A National Register district since October 14, 1980, conceived as an early nineteenth century Baroque city plan, of which the diagonal radiating streets are what survives. It carries no local overlay, so no certificate is required for exterior work.
  • Roseland Terrace. Listed on the National Register on March 11, 1982 as the city's first subdivision. The nomination recorded that it kept 88 percent of its pre-1930 housing and close to 300 bungalows in a concentrated area.
  • Goodwood. Goodwood Homesites carries eleven separate final plat approvals between 1940 and 1963 in the City-Parish subdivision record, and Goodwood Estates four more between 1932 and 1964.
  • Sherwood Forest. Twenty-one filings under that name were approved between 1955 and 1994, with West Sherwood Forest adding ten between 1956 and 1992. Two houses on adjoining streets can be thirty years apart.

Housing stock to check

  • The Census counted 106,421 housing units in the city for 2019 through 2023. The 1970s account for 20,522 of them, the 1960s for 17,565 and the 1950s for 12,206, and about 73 percent of the total predates 1980.
  • At the other end, 5,891 units date to 1939 or earlier and 6,462 to the 1940s. A house that old has been re-roofed, re-wired or re-plumbed by somebody, and the question a buyer asks is when and under what permit.
  • On a postwar house here, check the age plate on the condenser and the air handler, the date label on the water heater, and the brand inside the panel cover. Where a receipt is missing, those labels carry the only date a buyer's inspector can work from.
  • Cast iron drain lines and an original service panel are ordinary findings in a house platted in the 1950s or 1960s. Neither is a defect on its own, and both get written down.

East Baton Rouge Parish records and permits

Before you list in Baton Rouge

  • Permits inside the city come from the City-Parish Department of Development, Permits and Inspections at 300 North Tenth Street, which also permits the unincorporated parish, and applications run through MyGovernmentOnline. That office handles zoning, building, occupancy, mechanical, plumbing and electrical work, so one search covers the roof, the panel and any addition.
  • The sheriff collects East Baton Rouge property taxes, not a separate collector's office. Notices are generally mailed the last week of November and the bill is due on or before December 31, with interest running at 1 percent a month after that, so your closing date decides who settles the year you sell.
  • If the house sits in Spanish Town or Drehr Place, file the Certificate of Appropriateness with the receipt for the work it covered. Those two are the parish's local overlay districts, and exterior alterations visible from the street go through the Historic Preservation Commission there.

Gather

Permit history for past work

Pull the permit record for the roof, the windows, the panel, the water heater, and any addition. An open or missing permit on work already done is the item most likely to surface during inspection.

Inspect

Ceilings and the roof line

Look for stains, sagging drywall, and daylight in the attic, then walk the outside and look for lifted or missing shingles and tiles. Water shows up on a ceiling long after it started somewhere else.

Resolve

Replace every burned-out bulb

Match the color temperature across a room while you are at it. A house with one dead bulb per room photographs dim and shows dimmer.

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Last updated September 19, 2026