Our history
The creation of our company was through necessity. In 2003, our Founder, Peta-Gay Lewis’, parents purchased a home in Maryland which led to them deciding to rent their Washington, DC home. As customary in their Jamaican culture her parents looked to her to help them with the process. With no prior background in property management or real estate Peta-Gay was thrust into the industry and learned on the job. Over the years, she experienced all facets of residential leasing, budget projections, project management, unit turn over and judicial processing. However, through all of this she never saw it as a career but instead something she did "gratis" for others.
In 2011, Ms. Lewis became a homeowner. Her purchase was unique in that she purchased an Affordable Dwelling Unit (ADU) through two different government programs. One for down payment and the other as her loan lender. Never in DC’s history was that ever done. This caused Peta-Gay to garner the attention of both the local news media and government in Washington, DC. Ms. Lewis has been featured in the Washington Express Paper, included on the DC Department of Community Development homepage as "Featured Homebuyer", and within the annual report of the DC Housing Finance Agency.
With this occurrence her peers began asking her to assist them with their home purchase. Since she did not have a real estate license, Peta-Gay referred her peers to the real estate agents she knew but constantly those individuals would lament to her that they were making no progress in their dream of homeowners because oftentimes the agent involved did not know the down payment programs well or wanted to avoid them completely. In 2014, after repeatedly being asked Ms. Lewis finally decided to consider getting her real estate license since the year prior she had opened her own property management company, Paramount Star Realty. As the portfolio of properties she was managing had grown significantly and a real estate license was complementary to the work she was doing it seemed like a logical next step. After taking the licensing course Peta-Gay passed the Salesperson exam for Washington, DC in August, Virginia in September and Maryland in October of 2014. Ms. Lewis affiliated her license with one of the areas leading real estate brokerages. As an Independent Contractor of the firm Ms. Lewis wanted to conduct business under her business name however the brokerage had guidelines that prevented its affiliates from using the words "real estate" or "realty" in their company name so off the cuff the name "Property Locators" was decided upon.
It was always the goal to integrate both the real estate and property management divisions of the company under one license verse separate entities so in April of 2019 Ms. Lewis began taking coursework to sit for her Broker license. She passed her Washington, DC exam on June 28, 2019. Her Maryland exam on August 15, 2019 which also commemorated her 5th anniversary in real estate sales. The Virginia exam was passed on August 29, 2019.
While planning the brokerage creation Ms. Lewis wanted a company name that was easy to remember, timeless, sophisticated and translated well in print advertising. After months of agonizing over the perfect name while sitting in her brokers class the name "Ivy Real Estate" came to Peta-Gay. On July 2, 2019, Property Locators LLC officially began doing business as Ivy Real Estate.
When in business one must always aim to stay abreast of industry happenings and trends. With the real estate market rapidly changing since 2019 and with 2024 creating new precedents Ms. Lewis once again thought of what's best for the company and those we serve and decided to separate the Property Management & Sales of the company as previously done. On May 5, 2024 we created Ivy Property Management which will house all of our Property Management services.