Site selectors conference coming to Virginia Beach

Area Development magazine will bring its national spring conference for site selection consultants and economic development officials to Hampton Roads.

The Area Development Spring Consultants Forum is slated for June 10-12, 2024, at the Marriott Virginia Beach Oceanfront. Devoted to corporate site selection and relocation, the magazine typically holds two consultants’ forums annually in different locations.

Attendees will include influential decision-makers like site selection consultants, national developers and economic development professionals from across the U.S., says Jared Chalk, Hampton Roads Alliance’s chief business development officer.

Russell Young, the Port of Virginia’s vice president of port-centric logistics, explains, “It’s really an opportunity for us to tell our story, and in front of the right people.”

In spring 2019 and summer 2021, Area Development held a workshop and a consultants forum, respectively, in Richmond, but the June 2024 conference will be the first staged in Hampton Roads.

The Alliance, Port of Virginia and Virginia Beach city government collaborated to pitch the city to Area Development as the ideal location for its next forum, for which the Virginia Economic Development Partnership will be a co-host sponsor. The magazine has blocked off 340 room nights in the Marriott, but the team expects the real economic impact to come from the national site selection consultants who will be visiting the area.

Consultants could “see the opportunities that are here and, when they represent a client, put the Hampton Roads region and the Port of Virginia in front of them as an opportunity,” Young says.

Attracting “multiplier events” that allow regional representatives to network with multiple professionals and showcase Hampton Roads is one of the alliance’s regional economic development strategies, Chalk says.

“As national site selectors come here and really see this region and see the opportunities from the Port of Virginia all the way up to the Peninsula and some of the key assets that we have … we want to make sure that these corporate relocation professionals really understand the strong, diverse economic development ecosystem that exists and understand the strong workforce that we’ve got in Hampton Roads,” he says.

Economic development organizations already have had success attracting such events. This year, the Southern Economic Development Council held its annual conference in Williamsburg. The Virginia Economic Developers Association held its spring and fall conferences in Newport News and Portsmouth, respectively, and co-hosted the Virginia Consultants Forum with VEDP and Area Development at the Oceanfront Marriott in May.