Lake Charles May Be on the Cusp of Explosive Growth

By: jsl_dev_admin | May 28, 2025

In the two+ decades we have worked in the Lake Charles real estate market, we have not seen the market this poised for explosive growth, and the evidence keeps coming in.

There are new project announcements, ground breaking events and the phone is ringing on deals we’ve had listed for a while but were dormant.

The reasons for our growth begin with the remarkable recovery our community has made from the storms associated with Hurricane Laura four-five years ago. To recap our region’s advantages:

1. the abundance of natural gas in the U.S. (pipelines carrying the gas from Pennsylvania, the Dakotas, Texas); 2. the pipeline infrastructure (to the Henry Hub) and the deep-water port/export facilities are here to ship the compressed natural gas abroad. 3. There is a huge energy-dependent market outside of the U.S. that buys the LNG – and it only continues to grow as the unfortunate war in Ukraine goes on. And 4. The current administration is the most-friendly in decades to energy development and has the stated goal of energy independence for America.

By way of examples, we just had a $17 billion LNG facility announced by Woodside Energy – dba as Louisiana LNG Co. It’s an Australian-based energy conglomerate. From a real estate transaction perspective, the service companies I mentioned are willing and prefer to do long- term 10-years leases.

Further, we have a listing, an RV park in Hackberry. It’s a small town with limited services. The RV Park was built at the end of the first phase of the LNG energy boom and they lost it to the bank. It’s been vacant for about 5 years and today is ripe for investment to provide housing for the 6,000 transient workers that will be coming to our area in the next five years. The listing has been quiet, up until now; we are getting some activity on it.

Given the broad economic uncertainty and especially in gateway cities and other primary markets and asset classes, investors are seeking alternatives to growth markets that are connected to enduring economic fundamentals, and energy-associated real estate is one of them.