The Connecticut Expo Center, located on Hartford’s north side, is up for sale.

Exit the Expo Center. Struggling to compete with the 3-year-old Connecticut Convention Center in downtown Hartford, the Connecticut Expo Center, located on the city’s north side, is up for sale. “If somebody wanted to buy it to do something else with it, that’s what would happen,” said developer Philip Schonberger, an operating partner of the Expo Center along with Konover Properties Corp. “We thought we provided a useful service, but we’re getting put out of business.” The 103,680-square-foot exhibition space sits on 9 acres and is listed for $6.5 million. Schonberger and Konover took ownership of the site late in 1997, for $3.2 million, according to data from The Warren Group, the Commercial Record’s parent company. The debut of the state-owned Convention Center spelled trouble for the Expo Center, as the newer facility features 140,000 square feet of exhibition space, a 40,000-square-foot ballroom and 25,000 square feet of meeting space, and also is linked to the 409-room Marriott Hartford Downtown hotel. The closest hotel to the Expo Center is a 109-room Motel 6 a half-mile away. “The Convention Center has not been helpful to us,” Schonberger said. But it isn’t simply a matter of amenities. Schonberger said the two facilities are in competition because they wind up targeting the same groups. “They should [cater to different groups], but they don’t,” he said, adding that “we pay taxes, and they don’t.” But for Michael Van Parys, vice president at Greater Hartford Convention and Visitors Bureau, opening the Convention Center three years ago was about opening the city to new markets – not taking business from one facility to another. “The kinds of conventions that we go after now are just larger groups that have a greater need for meeting space,” said Van Parys, noting that the bureau works with both facilities. “So it’s really new business that we’ve brought into the city since the [Convention Center] and the Marriott have opened. It’s not necessarily re-churning business that was already here, and moving from one place to another. It’s more new stuff that we’re able to bring to the table.” “Essentially, the business that we’re bringing in is business that we probably wouldn’t have had before with the meeting venues we had before – and the number of hotel rooms,” Van Parys said. “With the Convention Center opening and the additional 400 rooms at the Marriott, it’s opened us up to a completely different type of market than we had before.” Trade shows and large conventions that translate into a need for hotel rooms – such as at the Marriott – are one segment of the business. But Victor J. Dellaripa Jr., executive director at the Expo Center, is particularly concerned with the consumer-show segment. While the Convention Center targets the larger conventions and trade shows, “when you can fill a weekend with a consumer show, if you can’t get a convention, you’re going to put whatever you can in there,” Dellaripa said. “We do go back and forth – [there are] shows here and there,” he said. “They do a home show; we do a home show. It’s a little bit of competition. But we’re hanging in there. We’re hanging tough.” Since the initial hit to its business in 2005, when the Convention Center opened, Dellaripa said the Expo Center has been clawing its way back. “We’re actually starting to get more interest now, and business is starting to pick back up again,” he said, noting that some shows that moved to the Convention Center have come back again. The Expo Center’s online list of bookings shows four events coming in April, but none after that. Depending on the intentions of the Expo Center’s next owner, the facility could remain in operation as it is. “It’s possible,” Schonberger said. “We don’t have any inclination one way or another.”