The closing. In Louisiana you do not sign at a title company with a closing agent, you sign an act of sale in front of a notary, and that document is what transfers ownership. Same moment as a closing anywhere else, different name and different legal weight.

The right to use a property and take its income without owning it outright. It most often appears when a spouse dies: the surviving spouse holds the usufruct, the children hold the ownership. A house under usufruct can be complicated to sell, so it is worth knowing about before you write an offer rather than after.

The other half of a usufruct. You own the property on paper while somebody else holds the right to live in it or collect its rent, often for their lifetime. A naked owner cannot simply sell and hand over the keys.

In Louisiana a notary does far more than witness a signature. A Louisiana notary can draft and pass acts of sale, and the notary is usually the person running your closing. Choosing one is a real decision, not a formality.

What Louisiana calls a county. Orleans Parish and the City of New Orleans share the same boundary, which is why you will see both on documents for the same house. Jefferson, St. Bernard and St. Tammany are the neighbors.

The Louisiana version of probate, the court process that moves property from someone who has died to their heirs. If a succession has not been completed, the heirs cannot give clear title, and that is the most common reason a New Orleans sale stalls.

The median. The grassy strip down the middle of a boulevard, and nobody here calls it anything else. The name comes from Canal Street, which once separated the Creole city from the American side, and the strip in the middle was the neutral ground between them. Now it is where you stand for parades.

A surveyor's document stating how high the lowest floor of a house sits relative to the base flood elevation. It is what a flood insurer prices from. A house without one is a house nobody can quote accurately, and getting one costs a few hundred dollars and a couple of weeks.

The height floodwater is expected to reach in a one-percent-chance flood year, set by FEMA for your specific location. Your house is measured against that number rather than against the street. Above it, premiums fall. Below it, they climb quickly.

FEMA's map letters. X is the lowest risk and usually the cheapest. A and AE are special flood hazard areas, where a lender will require flood insurance. V zones are coastal and rare inside the city. Maps get redrawn, so always check the current zone rather than the one quoted in an old listing.

Features that reduce storm damage: a fortified roof, impact glass, proper roof-to-wall connections, secondary water barriers. Louisiana insurers give real credits for them, and a fortified roof is one of the few upgrades that can pay for itself in premium savings.

A separate and much larger deductible that applies only when the damage comes from a named tropical storm or hurricane. It is usually a percentage of the insured value rather than a flat figure, so on a house insured for 600,000 a two percent named storm deductible is 12,000 before the policy pays anything. Read that line before you read the premium.

Louisiana Citizens Property Insurance Corporation, the state's insurer of last resort. It exists for houses the private market will not write, and by law its rates sit above the private market. If a quote comes back from Citizens, it is worth shopping harder before you accept it.

One room wide, several rooms deep, with the rooms opening directly into one another and no hallway. Built here by the thousands from the 1830s onward because it suits a narrow lot and a cross breeze. The name almost certainly has nothing to do with firing a gun through the front door, whatever your tour guide told you.

Two shotguns side by side under one roof, sharing a center wall. Many have been opened up into a single home and many are still two units. Find out early which one you are looking at, because it changes financing, insurance and what you are allowed to do with it.

A shotgun with a second story added at the back only, so the front stays one story and the rear rises like a hump. Usually a later addition, and often the best bedroom in the house.

A steep-roofed, four-room house sitting right at the sidewalk with no hallway and no front yard, typically with French doors across the front. The oldest house type in the city, and thick on the ground in the Quarter, Treme and the Marigny.

A hallway running front to back with rooms on either side, which is what most people outside Louisiana picture when they hear old house. Cooler, grander, and usually on a wider lot, which is why you find them in the Garden District and Uptown.

A New Orleans basement is not underground. It is the ground floor of a house lifted several feet on piers, sometimes finished, sometimes storage and parking. It is a flood strategy that predates flood maps, and it usually helps your insurance.

The early twentieth century arrival: wider than a shotgun, a low porch across the front, often a hall. Whole blocks of them in Mid-City, Gentilly and Lake Vista, and they tend to be the easiest old houses to live in without a renovation.

The Historic District Landmarks Commission, the city body that reviews exterior work across most of the historic neighborhoods outside the French Quarter. If your house sits in an HDLC district, changing windows, siding, roofing or anything else visible from the street needs their sign-off.

The Vieux Carre Commission, which does the same job for the French Quarter and does it more strictly. The Quarter has its own rules, its own staff and its own reputation, and the review is real.

A building that counts toward why its district is historic, which usually means old enough and intact enough to matter. Contributing status brings tighter review of what you can change, and it also opens the door to historic tax credits.

The approval you need before doing exterior work in a historic district. Get it before the work, not after. Doing it in the wrong order is how people end up taking a brand new front door back off at their own expense.

State and federal credits that offset a share of a qualifying renovation on a certified historic building. The paperwork is real and the rules are specific, but on a serious restoration the credits can change the math entirely. Talk to a consultant who does this for a living before you start demolition.