Earthquake: The Long Road Back : Many Turn to Ventura County for a Safe Haven : Relocations: Realty offices are flooded by calls from Valley residents and business owners following Monday’s temblor.

San Fernando Valley residents and business owners are flooding Ventura County realty offices and apartment complexes, looking for safe places to live or do business in the wake of Monday’s devastating earthquake, real estate agents said Friday.

“It’s just been phenomenal,” said Kelli Tardif-Arriola, administrative manager for the Westlake office of Bob Ely Realty, where agents have fielded 75 calls for residential rental properties since Tuesday morning.

At least half of those calls, Tardif-Arriola said, were from Valley residents anxious to get out.

Many are like Shelley Maine, 29, and her fiancee, Ted Osier, 30, Northridge apartment dwellers who have often considered leaving the North Valley, an area they describe as crime-ridden and graffiti-plagued.

“After the earthquake we said, ‘Yes, definitely, that’s it,’ ” said Maine, who works as a lab technician in Calabasas. On Friday, the couple looked at apartments in Thousand Oaks and Camarillo.

Although the rents are higher in Ventura County, particularly in Thousand Oaks, the couple said it was worth the extra $200 a month to live in a building that is seismically sound and in a neighborhood where they could feel safe.

“I just want a little peace and quiet,” Osier said.

Commercial real estate agents also report a booming rental market for office and manufacturing space. Like residential agents, they say the bulk of the interest is concentrated in Westlake, Thousand Oaks and Newbury Park, with a few renters looking as far east as Camarillo.

“We all have beepers and car phones, and they are all beeping and ringing off the hook right now,” said Jack Dwyer, a realtor with Brown-Realtors’ Westlake commercial division in Thousand Oaks. Dwyer said he received 10 such calls in a 24-hour period.

“We think in 30 to 60 days, we’ll have very little vacancy in the area,” he said.

Commercial brokers say the calls range from manufacturers requesting as much as 120,000 square feet of manufacturing plant space, to doctors and lawyers looking for 1,500-square-foot offices to hang their shingles.

“I’m taking out one company this afternoon to look at 100,000 square feet of manufacturing space in Camarillo,” Grubb & Ellis broker Rick Heath said. “Their building in the Valley was condemned.”

The old City Hall on Hillcrest Drive in Thousand Oaks--virtually untouched by the earthquake--has caught the interest of at least three quake-rattled Valley companies looking to relocate to more solid ground, City Manager Grant Brimhall said.

Brimhall said the unnamed companies have asked about moving into the building, situated atop a rocky hillside overlooking The Oaks mall.

Suddenly flush with new clients, brokers said they are reluctant to release the business owners’ names for fear other brokers will read the list and start wooing their clients.

At least one big deal, however, has been made public already--in Los Angeles County, just down the street from the Ventura County line. Computer giant Packard Bell leased 160,000 square feet of space after its Chatsworth headquarters received severe earthquake damage.

Packard Bell executives have spent months looking for a suitable new site for its operations, but the quake put those plans on hold, company officials said.

Starting next week, Packard Bell will open its headquarters and some production facilities at a vacant site in Westlake Village that the company had previously considered in its search. On Tuesday, Packard Bell officials said, it seemed like a good choice, at least temporarily. They are making plans to stay for at least a year.

“This was very convenient to us . . . because it doesn’t really change our operations in any major way,” said Mal Ransom, Packard Bell’s vice president of marketing. “We just moved down the (Ventura Freeway) a bit.”

Realtors hope other businesses and residents will follow. But they say it is too early to tell what, if any, effect all the inquiries and rental showings will have on the county’s real estate market.

“I think it’s more smoke than fire right now,” said George Hutchison, an agent with Brown-Realty’s residential division in Westlake.

On the one hand, he said, some callers might be reacting to an initial fright that will die down as the quake’s aftershocks level off. Conversely, others might not have had time to call an agent and start looking, he said.

“I think many people (in the Valley) with damaged homes are still standing in lines at the FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) centers,” he said.

Of the many looking for houses and apartments spared by the tremors, some seem to have set their sights on Simi Valley, though parts of the city incurred quake damage as severe as in the Valley.

“Most people are looking for something safe, and the news didn’t play up . . . Simi Valley as that badly damaged,” said Mary Ferris, an agent at Valley Homes Realtors in Simi Valley.

Ferris said she received 30 calls in one day alone, many of them from Valley residents interested in two rentals she had advertised in the paper. Ironically, both residences were severely damaged in the earthquake and are in no condition to be rented out, she said.

West of Sycamore Drive, however, many rental properties are still standing, largely unaffected by the quake, she said.

“You put an ad in the paper today, 100 people will call,” she predicted.

Times staff writer Mack Reed contributed to this story.