Portsmouth making a push to shed its image

PORTSMOUTH Standing in front of photos of sparkling kitchens, spacious master suites and new brick homes, Tia Ervin listened intently to the salesman’s pitch.

Ervin, a Chesapeake Realtor with Long & Foster, regularly sells houses in Portsmouth. But even she wasn’t familiar with King’s Crossing, a new neighborhood of single-family homes off Airline Boulevard. “There’s all these sites I didn’t know about,” she said.

That was the idea behind the city’s first annual open house for real estate agents. In a slowing housing market, Portsmouth – in the past, a city from which Realtors sometimes steered buyers away – is making a push to shed its image as an aging city with less desirable neighborhoods.

From downtown condominiums to single-family houses in Churchland, the program’s goal was to introduce the city’s new developments in the hopes of sparking property sales, said Steve Lynch, Portsmouth’s economic development director.

“The Portsmouth we know today isn’t the Portsmouth we had yesterday,” he said. “It has a new life. We wanted people to know.”

More than 50 Realtors attended the open house, which featured new residential developments from eight companies who displayed their projects in a conference room at the Virginia Sports Hall of Fame and Museum. Lynch said he hoped to draw agents who rarely did business in Portsmouth – people such as Carl Mansfield, a Century 21 Realtor who usually sells homes in Norfolk and Chesapeake.

“It’s time to expand out, to see what was out here,” Mansfield said, adding that he liked what he saw. Portsmouth’s greatest selling point, he said, might be that developers have continued to build new homes valued at $200,000 to $300,000 – a price more affordable to first-time buyers.

Along with information about lot sizes, price ranges, floor plans and amenities, the Realtors walked away with pamphlets touting commercial developments under way and information about new school programs and improved test scores. “Portsmouth gets a bad rap,” Ervin said. “But they’re building it up so well.”

“It’s a really good story a lot of people don’t know about,” said Paula Moore, Ervin’s colleague .

Like Ervin, Moore already sells homes in Portsmouth but said she came Thursday to get ideas to help improve sales. “Everybody wants that new house,” Moore said. “I’d love to be able to sell it to them.”

Meghan Hoyer, (757) 446-2293, meghan.hoyer@pilotonline.com