Pest Control in Norfolk, VA

Year-Round Pest Pressure

Why Pest Control in Norfolk Isn’t One-Size-Fits-All

Norfolk has been rebuilt and re-annexed so many times that its neighborhoods still carry distinct identities rather than blending into one city. Ghent was laid out as one of Norfolk’s first suburbs in the late 1800s, and the arrival of the trolley car in 1894 is what actually made the neighborhood possible, letting residents commute into downtown while living in the close-set Victorian and Colonial Revival houses that still define the area today. Berkley, on the opposite bank of the Elizabeth River, was its own incorporated town until Norfolk annexed it in 1906, and it kept the older, working-class housing stock and industrial-adjacent footprint that a separate municipal history left behind. Ocean View has an even older identity of its own: the area was developed starting in 1854 as a private bayfront resort, long before Norfolk annexed it along with Willoughby Spit and Sewell’s Point in 1923. Because Ocean View sits on some of the lowest ground in a city that the Virginia Institute of Marine Science projects could see more than five feet of additional sea-level rise by the end of the century, moisture-driven pest pressure here is a genuine, ongoing concern rather than an occasional one. That same 1923 annexation also brought in the Navy Base, home to Naval Station Norfolk, established in 1917 and still the largest naval installation in the world — a fact that shapes pest control in a very practical way, since the constant cycle of military families moving in and out of nearby rental housing in Larchmont and Willoughby Spit creates the kind of turnover that tends to bring bed bugs and other hitchhiking pests along with the moving trucks. And the Wards Corner and Military Highway corridor, along with the mid-century subdivisions further from the urban core, mixes commercial retail pest pressure with the kind of aging suburban housing stock that needs a different approach than either the historic core or the waterfront.

One termite note is worth knowing, and it names Norfolk directly. The native eastern subterranean termite remains the established species throughout the city and across Virginia, and it is what our inspections are built around. Separately, the trade publication Pest Management Professional reported in October 2022 that a sample of Formosan subterranean termite alates and soldiers had been collected from a commercial structure in Norfolk and identified at the Rollins Support Center — a single confirmed detection, and the northernmost on record at the time. Formosan termites are not established in Virginia, and Virginia Tech and VDACS still name the eastern subterranean as the state’s termite species. It is simply one more reason annual termite inspections are worth scheduling regardless of a home’s age or which part of Norfolk it sits in.