Kailas Companies

Kailas Companies is a real estate development and management firm based in New Orleans, Louisiana. The company owns and operates a portfolio of commercial, hospitality and mixed-use property in the New Orleans market, and has concentrated on adaptive reuse of large downtown buildings that no longer work as single-tenant office space. Its largest current project is the roughly $90 million redevelopment of 1010 Common Street, a 31-story, 780,000-square-foot tower completed in 1971 and listed on the National Register. The building is being split among a 250-room Fairmont hotel across 18 floors, about 100,000 square feet of Class A office and rebuilt ground-floor retail, using federal and state historic tax credits.

The company traces back to 1990 and a single development by founder C. Mohan Kailas. It now owns and manages more than two million square feet across Louisiana, spanning historic renovations, office towers, residences, and retail. The corporate home is 3525 N. Causeway Blvd in Metairie, a roughly 120,000-square-foot office building the firm owns and operates, with tenants that include AIG and Regions Bank.

Historic conversion is the through-line of the portfolio. The largest current undertaking is 1010 Common Street, a 31-story downtown landmark being redeveloped into 467 hotel rooms, about 100,000 square feet of office space, 525 parking spaces, and several food and beverage outlets. On a smaller scale, Merchant Lofts at 201 Magazine Street turned a historic building into 38 apartments with ground-floor retail and was fully leased on its opening day at the end of December 2011.

Two projects show the firm working at full-block scale. The Jackson, in the Lower Garden District, combines new tower construction with the landmark renovation of the former Sara Mayo Hospital into 205 residences and 13,000 square feet of retail, reclaiming a square block that had sat in disrepair since the late 1980s. Parkway Apartments does something similar uptown, rebuilding a square block across Washington Avenue from Xavier University into 207 residences plus retail, on land that had been derelict since 2005.

The commercial and residential side of the business is quieter but steady. 4051 Veterans Blvd holds about 40,000 square feet of professional office space on one of Metairie’s main commercial corridors, with tenants including Coldwell Banker and GEICO. Cleary Condos began as an office building and was converted in 2007 into 35 condominiums, with the firm managing both the property and the condo association. The company frames its work in terms of obligation rather than product, writing that decisions about land and buildings outlast the people making them, and that the intent is for each project to leave a neighborhood with more housing, more stability, and more opportunity than it had before.