Interviewer: Laura Ek

Affiliation: University of Arizona

I was referred to Bill Bacque by Kim and William Goodell. The Goodell’s referred me to him as an authority on real estate in the Lafayette and surrounding parishes during the 1980s. I called him and explained the project and we set up an interview at his office.

Bill Bacque is currently the CEO for Van Eaton & Romero real estate, a position he has held since 1987. He graduated from high school and went on to college in finance at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette (then at the time University of Southwestern Lousiana). He graduated from ULL in 1974, and a year before that in 1973 he married his high school sweetheart. He moved to Lake Charles, Louisiana in 1973 (or 1974) and pursued a job in real estate, receiving his real estate license. In 1981, at the encouragement of family and friends in Lafayette, he moved back with his wife and their two sons. He got a job in real estate handling repossessed properties for the Veteran’s administration, which he worked in until 1987 when he became the CEO of his current company. Today, he gives lectures on real estate to groups in the region (e.g. the Kiwanis club) and manages his company.

In our interview, he brought a presentation of prepared slides with graphs showing changes in real estate from 1981 to 2010. A large portion of the interview, he describes each page of the presentation and what those numbers mean for Lafayette. He discusses changes in value for homes and their direct correlation to jobs in the area (including oil), the reason for spikes and crashes in real estate in the town, and who left and who stayed during the bust. During the last part of our interview, after the recorder was turned off, he goes on to discuss more on the culture of Lafayette and the nature of having the oil industry here. The notes from that conversation are below.